Good Strategy Bad Strategy

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.