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Good Strategy Bad Strategy
A book on telling a real strategy from a list of goals and slogans
Why it’s worth your time
Good Strategy Bad Strategy draws a hard line between a strategy and a set of goals dressed up as one. Plenty of plans at work tend to blur the two, and Richard Rumelt's book gives you a way to tell them apart. It can help anyone handed a plan they can't quite believe in, or asked to write one.
What makes a strategy good or bad
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read what makes strategy bad, then what makes it good.
Read Rumelt's case against fluff and goals posing as strategy, then his account of the kernel that good strategy shares. The middle section, on sources of power, is worth dipping into if your work involves competing for customers, funding or attention.
- Write the challenge in one sentence.
Take a plan your team is working from, or your own priorities for the quarter, and write in one sentence the obstacle it's meant to overcome. Then add the approach the plan takes and two actions that follow from it. If you can't name the obstacle, note that as your finding.
Good moments for this: at the start of a planning seasonwhen a new plan arrives from abovebefore you pitch your team's next priority
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Leading with the diagnosis tends to make a proposal easier to accept, because the other person can check your reasoning before they weigh your plan.
What might make this harder
Run Rumelt's test on your own month instead: write the one obstacle that, if you dealt with it, would make the most of the rest easier, and one action you'd take on it this week.
Questions people ask
What is Good Strategy Bad Strategy about?
It's a 2011 book by Richard Rumelt, a longtime strategy professor at UCLA's Anderson School. He argues that much of what organizations call strategy is really goals, slogans and fluff, and that good strategy has a kernel of three parts: a diagnosis that defines the obstacle, a guiding policy that sets the overall approach, and a set of coherent actions that put the approach into practice. He builds the case from business, military and nonprofit examples.
What are the signs of bad strategy, according to Rumelt?
In one reviewer's summary, Rumelt names four: not facing the challenge, treating goals as if they were strategy, setting poor strategic objectives, and fluff. Fluff, roughly, is grand language that sounds deep and commits to nothing.
What's the difference between a goal and a strategy?
A goal says where you want to end up. A strategy, in Rumelt's sense, explains how you'll get there given what's in the way, which choices that implies, and what you'll stop doing. A plan that's only a goal tends to leave the people carrying it out to guess at the rest.
What it says, and how it holds up
If you've ever sat through a strategy presentation that turned out to be a list of targets and values, this book names what was missing. For Rumelt, a strategy starts with an honest account of the problem, which no ambitious goal can stand in for. He's scathing about vision statements and positive thinking used in place of analysis. The publisher's list of detailed examples includes Apple, General Motors and the two Iraq wars; Wikipedia's account of the book cites Steve Jobs's second spell as Apple's CEO as good strategy, and the reviewer Phil Rosenzweig points to Rumelt's admiration for Alfred P. Sloan's product policy at General Motors.
Rumelt spent decades as a strategy scholar at Harvard and then UCLA, and helped found the resource-based view of strategy, which explains a company's success through the distinctive resources it builds. Rosenzweig, reviewing the book for strategy+business, called it the year's best and most original strategy book: informal and personal, with opinions that are often contrarian. Anyone hoping for a simple formula would be disappointed, he wrote, but he found its message liberating, since strategy doesn't have to be complicated. It was a finalist for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. Case stories in any strategy book are told with hindsight, which can make good choices look more obvious than they were at the time. Rosenzweig's own book, The Halo Effect, is a useful companion on that problem. If the diagnosis is the part you want more of, Rumelt's later book, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists (2022), is built around finding the most important part of a challenge that can actually be tackled.
The kernel assumes you can name the challenge. In genuinely new territory, a new product or a market nobody understands yet, the honest diagnosis may be that you don't know enough, and a few small, cheap experiments can teach more than a sharper plan. Eric Ries's The Lean Startup is built for that situation.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.