This book was added to my reading list when I was reading An Elegant Puzzle. The part on engineering strategy was very praising. When I picked up this book, I was joining a new team and one of the problems I faced was what to focus on in the first few months. This book helped me articulate a strategy that was far removed from the usual corporate BS you hear all the time. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which covers what strategy is not and why we have so much bullshit strategy around. The second part covers the how. The key takeaways for me were - Strategy must address concrete problems - Strategy needs to address weaknesses and strengths, both ours and our competitors’. - Strategy must have leverage

Do not read unless you want to get angry every time someone presents you with some BS disguised as strategy.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

A good strategy recognizes the nature of the challenge and offers a way of surmounting it. Simply being ambitious is not a strategy.

Strategy cannot be a useful concept if it is a synonym for success.

Executives who complain about “execution” problems have usually confused strategy with goal setting.

Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests.

The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or, if you prefer, strength applied to the most promising opportunity.

A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies, and resources so as to accomplish an important end.

Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests are the luxuries of the rich and powerful, but they make for bad strategy.

Fluff is superficial restatement of the obvious combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords.

A strategy is like a lever that magnifies force.

They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.”

Hearing this, many Americans nod in agreement. Many Europeans, by contrast, hear the echo of the “one last push” at Passchendaele. There, the slaughtered troops did not suffer from a lack of motivation.

The job of the leader is also to create the conditions that will make that push effective, to have a strategy worthy of the effort called upon.

A good strategy defines a critical challenge.

Bad strategy flourishes because it floats above analysis, logic, and choice, held aloft by the hot hope that one can avoid dealing with these tricky fundamentals and the difficulties of mastering them.

Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choice means setting aside some goals in favor of others.

When organizations are unable to make new strategies—when people evade the work of choosing among different paths into the future—then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals that everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership’s insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices. Put differently, universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice.

At a minimum, a diagnosis names or classifies the situation, linking facts into patterns and suggesting that more attention be paid to some issues and less to others.

a real-world strategy could not be logically deduced from the observed facts. Rather, a diagnosis had to be an educated guess as to what was going on in the situation, especially about what was critically important.

The diagnosis for the situation should replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story,

good strategic diagnosis does more than explain a situation—it also defines a domain of action.

The guiding policy outlines an overall approach for overcoming the obstacles highlighted by the diagnosis. It is “guiding” because it channels action in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done.

Good guiding policies are not goals or visions or images of desirable end states. Rather, they define a method of grappling with the situation and ruling out a vast array of possible actions.

In general, strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concentrated application of effort.

Anticipation does not require psychic powers. In many circumstances, anticipation simply means considering the habits, preferences, and policies of others, as well as various inertias and constraints on change.

A pivot point magnifies the effect of effort.

Returns to concentration arise when focusing efforts on fewer, or more limited, objectives generates larger payoffs.

One of a leader’s most powerful tools is the creation of a good proximate objective—one that is close enough at hand to be feasible. A proximate objective names a target that the organization can reasonably be expected to hit, even overwhelm.

The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be.

To concentrate on an objective—to make it a priority—necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care

Quality matching. That is, if you are in charge of one link of the chain, there is no point in investing resources in making your link better if other link managers are not.

performance is the joint outcome of capability and clever design.

Good strategy is design, and design is about fitting various pieces together so they work as a coherent whole.

How can we independently identify a company’s strategy? We do this by looking at each policy of the company and noticing those that are different from the norm in the industry.

A brand’s value comes from guaranteeing certain characteristics of the product.

The work of discerning whether there are important changes afoot involves getting into the gritty details. To make good bets on how a wave of change will play out you must acquire enough expertise to question the experts.

A new strategy is, in the language of science, a hypothesis, and its implementation is an experiment. As results appear, good leaders learn more about what does and doesn’t work and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Identifying the difficulties and obstacles will give you a much clearer picture of the pattern of existing and possible strategies.

shift your attention from what is being done to why it is being done, from the directions chosen to the problems that these choices address.

Trying to destroy your own ideas is not easy or pleasant. It takes mental toughness to pick apart one’s own insights. In my own case, I rely on outside help—I invoke a virtual panel of experts that I carry around in my mind. This panel of experts is a collection of people whose judgments I value. I use an internal mental dialogue with them to both critique my own ideas and stimulate new ones. I try to do this before putting my ideas before others.