Where to Start with Richard Rumelt
Richard Rumelt is an American economist, professor, and author widely regarded as one of the most influential strategy thinkers of the past half century. He holds the Harry and Elsa Kunin Chair Emeritus at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he taught for over four decades. Rumelt received his doctorate from Harvard Business School and his master’s in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. His academic research on diversification strategy and the resource-based view of the firm helped shape the modern field of strategic management. McKinsey Quarterly has called him “a giant in the field of strategy” and “strategy’s strategist.” His 2011 book “Good Strategy Bad Strategy” became a bestseller and is considered essential reading for business leaders, selling over 200,000 copies worldwide. He followed it with “The Crux” in 2022, which focuses on identifying the most critical challenge in any strategic situation. Outside academia, Rumelt has consulted for organizations including the Department of Defense, Samsung, and numerous Fortune 500 companies.
Start here
Good Strategy Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt · 336 pages · 2011 · Moderate
Themes: business strategy, competitive advantage, leadership, critical thinking
The most important book on strategy written in the last two decades. Richard Rumelt dismantles the comfortable fictions that pass for strategy in most organizations and shows what the real thing looks like.
Why Start Here
Rumelt starts by showing you what bad strategy looks like: vague aspirations dressed up as strategy, refusal to make hard choices, failure to identify the actual problem. Good strategy, he argues, has a simple structure he calls the “kernel”: a diagnosis that defines the challenge, a guiding policy that outlines the approach, and coherent actions that carry it out. The examples drawn from Apple, Nvidia, Walmart, and dozens of other cases show how rarely organizations achieve this coherence.
This book teaches you to think about strategy rather than giving you a template. The frameworks in other books become far more powerful once you have internalized Rumelt’s core insight: strategy is about focus and choice, not about trying to do everything.
What to Expect
A 336-page book that reads like a series of deeply analyzed case studies. Rumelt writes with clarity and directness, drawing on four decades of consulting and academic work. The prose is sharp, not academic. You will find yourself reconsidering your own organization’s strategy before you are halfway through.