Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard P. RumeltMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A business strategy book which defines what can be called a "good" strategy vs "bad" one.
The author points out in quite an insightful way that nowadays the word "strategic" can mean anything from "something that a CEO told us to do" to "our biggest customer" - but then it has nothing to do with company's strategy as a choice of course of action. A strategy is often associated with fluffy statements of mission-vision-values. A strategy is also often mixed up with set of goals.
Instead, Rumelt suggests that defining of a good strategy shall start with figuring out what is really going on, what are the largest obstacles the company is facing. Start with diagnosis - what situation the company is in? And then the overall guiding policy and set of actions shall be defined.
There were several interesting case studies described there. I particularly liked the ones describing the good choice of strategy by IBM, Nvidia and Apple back in the days. Unfortunately, all the case studies have been either from some of the largest corporations in the world or the U.S. government / military. It's interesting reading, but is not as insightful if you lead anything below an organisation of 10.000 employees.
The book is a little bit long-winded and the whole part 3 ("Thinking Like a Strategist") is rather boring and could well be skipped. It felt like a forceful addition of some "strategy ideas" to an overall argument.
