Good Strategy Bad Strategy

The most important book on strategy written in the last two decades. Richard Rumelt, a professor at UCLA Anderson and one of the most respected strategy thinkers alive, dismantles the comfortable fictions that pass for strategy in most organizations and shows what the real thing looks like.

Why Start Here

Most strategy books tell you to set bold goals and align your team. Rumelt does the opposite. He starts by showing you what bad strategy looks like, and it is everywhere: vague aspirations dressed up as strategy, refusal to make hard choices, failure to identify the actual problem. Once you see bad strategy clearly, you cannot unsee it.

Good strategy, Rumelt argues, has a simple underlying structure he calls the “kernel.” It starts with a diagnosis that defines the challenge, continues with a guiding policy that outlines the overall approach, and concludes with coherent actions that carry out the policy. This sounds straightforward, but the examples he draws from Apple, Nvidia, Walmart, the Iraq wars, and dozens of other cases show how rarely organizations manage to achieve this coherence.

What makes this book the right starting point is that it teaches you to think about strategy rather than giving you a template to fill in. 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 finish the first third. This is not a step-by-step guide. It is a book that changes how you see the strategic landscape.