Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

A good strategy recognizes the nature of the challenge and offers a way of surmounting it. Simply being ambitious is not a strategy.

. A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them.

Strategy cannot be a useful concept if it is a synonym for success. Nor can it be a useful tool if it is confused with ambition, determination, inspirational leadership, and innovation. Ambition is drive and zeal to excel. Determination is commitment and grit. Innovation is the discovery and engineering of new ways to do things. Inspirational leadership motivates people to sacrifice for their own and the common good.1 And strategy, responsive to innovation and ambition, selects the path, identifying how, why, and where leadership and determination are to be applied.

the term “strategy” should mean a cohesive response to an important challenge. Unlike a stand-alone decision or a goal, a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to a high-stakes challenge.

Many people assume that a strategy is a big-picture overall direction, divorced from any specific action. But defining strategy as broad concepts, thereby leaving out action, creates a wide chasm between “strategy” and “implementation.”

. A good strategy includes a set of coherent actions.

A strategy that fails to define a variety of plausible and feasible immediate actions is missing a critical component.

Executives who complain about “execution” problems have usually confused strategy with goal

Strategy is about how an organization will move forward. Doing strategy is figuring out how to advance the organization’s interests.

A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains

three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.

The most basic idea of strategy is the application of strength against weakness. Or, if you prefer,

The first natural advantage of good strategy arises because other organizations often don’t have one.

. A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies, and resources so as to accomplish an important end.