Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Rumelt's argument is cutting: most of what gets called "strategy" in organisations is not strategy at all — it is goals, or slogans, or lists of initiatives. Real strategy has a kernel: a diagnosis of the situation, a guiding policy, and a coherent set of actions. Without all three you have bad strategy, which is often worse than no strategy because it commits resources in a direction that cannot succeed. For product direction this is the most diagnostic book on strategy in print; Rumelt's vocabulary (kernel, bad strategy, chain-link systems) survives contact with actual strategy meetings. Read alongside Porter for the theoretical foundations, Magretta for a compressed Porter, and Rumelt for the operational critique.