good-strategy-bad-strategy

# Good Strategy Bad Strategy A framework for creating and auditing strategy, distilled from Richard Rumelt's *Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters*. Good strategy has a simple underlying logic — an honest diagnosis of the critical challenge, a guiding policy for overcoming it, and coherent actions that carry the policy out. Use this skill to detect the four hallmarks of bad strategy and to replace goal lists and vision decks with a working kernel. ## Core Principle **Strategy is coherent action backed by an honest diagnosis — not goals, vision, or wishful thinking.** A goal ("20% growth") names an ambition; a strategy explains how the ambition will be achieved given the actual obstacles. Bad strategy is not the absence of strategy but an active substitute for it: buzzword fluff, refusal to name the challenge, and laundry lists of initiatives. The heart of strategy work is choice — concentrating effort and resources on the one or two pivotal objectives whose accomplishment unlocks everything else. ## Scoring **Goal: 10/10.** Score strategies, plans, and strategy documents by walking the eight rows of the Quick Diagnostic and counting how many pass. Report the current score and the specific changes needed to reach 10/10. The bands below name what each tier looks like; the row count keeps the rating reproducible run to run. - **9-10 (8 rows pass):** Complete kernel — honest diagnosis, choiceful guiding policy, coordinated resource-backed actions — ...