Good Strategy / Bad Strategy: The
Difference and Why It Matters - Richard Rumelt
My take home points from the book. Recommended
reading for marketers in large corporations – good chance you will recognise
many standard procedures in the “bad strategy” sections . . .
- The core of strategy is about focus and the application of strength against weakness or the most promising opportunity;
- A good strategy has an essential logical structure that contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action;
- First work to discover the very most promising opportunities for the business;
- The cleverest strategies begin with strategic resources that competitors cannot duplicate without suffering a net economic loss.
- Look at the special skills and resources that underlie a competitive advantage (momentarily look away from products, buyers, and competitors)
- Achieve leverage by identifying a pivot point that will magnify the effects of focused energy and resources.
- To obtain higher performance, leaders must identify the critical obstacles to forward progress;
- Look very closely at what is changing in your business, where you might get a jump on the competition;
- A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength; it creates strength through the coherence of its design;
- Advantage is rooted in differences. By providing more value you avoid being a commodity.
- Create-destroy discipline. The creation of new higher quality alternatives requires that one tries hard to “destroy” any existing alternatives, exposing their fault lines and internal contradictions.
- The most powerful strategies arise from game-changing insights;
- Pre-commit to a position and then evaluate your own judgment to increase the chance of learning something.
- Take on the viewpoints of others. See how the situation looks to a rival or to a customer, anticipate others’ behaviour.
- Engineering higher demand for the services of scarce resources is the most basic of business stratagems.
- Follow Michael Porter’s “Five Forces” analysis in preference to SWOT analysis.
- Leaders must acquire enough expertise to question the experts.
- You should have a very short list of the most important things for the company to do.
- A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component;
- Make objectives more like tasks and less like goals.
- Look five to ten years ahead.
- Avoid strategy plans by template filling
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