There's a lot of fluff in this article but the main things for me are that strategy includes deciding what not to do, and that it's easy to mistake goals for strategies.
Maybe the best place to see this is sports. How often have you been playing a match, and at some point the coach says "we need to score a goal"? As if that's not obvious. What he needs to say is "keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass".
The problem with "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass" is still a tactic. Having recently started attempting to understand what a strategy really is, I've understood the following.
A strategy is tripartite. The Strategy, it's Guiding Principles and Actions (tactics)
A strategy takes into account the environment within which one is working and to view it as a dynamic thing. In your football example we might be able to say that the dynamic part of the game is how the opposition arranges their players and who is in which position.
Knowing this we can define some Guiding Principles for the individual game. One might choose a loaded and strong defence as your team's offence is not as strong as the oppositions defence. The guiding principle is "Defend our ground"
Actions (tactics) would be "Keep the few strikers far forward and protect the defenders"
Caveat: I'm not a footballer, and I wish I had written this to end up with the original tactic mentioned "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass"
Perhaps another problem with strategy is that we expect too much from it, because we neglect and devalue tactics. I often hear "strategic thinking" lauded and "tactical thinking" looked down upon by managerial types. But a strategy alone achieves nothing--you need good tactics to execute on it.
background: i make my living putting together quantitative analysis to support / reject strategic decisions
I would not say a strategy alone achieves nothing - its actually quite the opposite the larger your "team" and scope of activity is. A lot of business decisions are not related to having a tactic but are a trade off between two important things (like cost and quality). Having a clear strategy allows people in your company to arrive at the same decision for which side of that trade-off to favor - which increases individual autonomy. For example, a high volume strategy leads to favoring low cost. A strategy to be scalable might favor higher upfront costs since cheap non-scalable options are removed from review. In both cases, when an option doesnt fit the strategy it is not considered an option. So your decision pool is reduced. Sometimes this reduction is enough that the choice is made for you. Especially when accounting for multiple strategies and company initiatives.
Tactics are a different beast. Sometimes a tactic involves going against the general strategy, but is approved because there is confident calculation behind it and the expected result is wanted. The most important thing here is the calculation. It takes time and energy to develop and communicate a tactic. Those things are limited, so you can only be working on so many tactics at once, and only so many people are qualified to be doing that work (because those job titles are expensive).
The critical factor here is that the volume of decisions that need to be made across an organization on a day-to-day basis are not bound by how much time you have to develop a tactic for each of them. So you have to trust the autonomy of your company hierarchy at each level to be able to make default decisions that dont interfere with company strategy. A strategy alone is enough to help keep a loose handle on things.. it goes a long way to preventing chaos.
You might end up with a cashier accepting a return on something that is obviously not a valid return, but the overall strategy of being return-friendly is maintained. You also dont end up with a fist-fight between your cashier and the customer (extreme alternative example). When you have time, you develop a tactic for validating returns with order#'s or receipts, etc. but maybe your tactic team is busy dealing with warehouse optimizations this month
Yes, flexibly applying situational tactics to follow the principle and spirit of the strategy rather than the letter of the rulebook, is what leaders generally want their people to do. They communicate intent and let good judgement do the rest.
The way I have always thought of strategy, though, is that it should be directional. Say what input variables you think we should increase or decrease, in order to get closer to the optimum, relative to where we are currently.
Taking your example of cost vs. quality. Obviously we want to find an optimum. If a manager can state which direction we need to move in and why, to make progress toward the optimum, I will take their strategy seriously. But if they just tell their people to "optimize," I dismiss them as having no strategy. A manager who's responsible for formulating and communicating a strategy, has to at least have an opinion about which side of the curve we're currently on.
Early in my career I was an analyst at an ocean shipping company--lower rates meant fuller ships, higher rates meant better unit margin but lower utilization. Corporate's strategic message? "Fill up the ships with high-paying cargo." It became a joke among the employees.
In all my reading I've never found a satisfactory distinction between strategy and tactics. Every attempt I've seen either doesn't provide a clear answer or falls on some simple contradiction.
My current thinking is that people tend to think of strategy as higher level than tactics, but that there's never a clear line that tells you which you are looking at. It's more the importance you want to give some decision that determines what you call it.
> These two aspects of the gameplay cannot be completely separated, because strategic goals are mostly achieved through tactics, while the tactical opportunities are based on the previous strategy of play.
And yet when you ask a chess player whether the situation has a tactic or a strategy in it (in some cases both), they can tell you which choice is a tactic and which is a strategy. Tactics are so well recognized that you can practice them: https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated
“Strategy is choosing what not to do” is the standard trope.
Start-ups sorta get this already: focus on a core base of customers who love your product despite its flaws. Iterate.
The insight I liked best in this article was, “In contrast, top executives should resist the temptation to decide what projects live and die within their firms. Strategy implementation requires top managers to design the company’s internal system that does the selection for them.”
So much your job as an exec is to design the system that gives others enough context and autonomy to flourish.
And hopefully over time that system continues to improve itself.
Second this. If execs don't build a system that enables people employees are simple tools. Sure, execs like the superficial control that comes with it. Yet, it doesn't serve customers, employees nor the company and its execs.
We have a scientist in Denmark called Morten Münster who wrote a book called “Jytte fra marketing er desværre gået for i dag” (Karen from marketing has unfortunately left for the day), in which he talks a lot about the necessity of clear and simple strategies that can be understood by employees at 3pm on a busy Thursday. He has a lot of good examples, but mostly he outlines how silly something a long the lines of “forward together” is as a strategy because it quite literally means nothing to anyone who does any real work.
It agrees with this article, and I always find it kind of hilarious. I do work on the public sector, and we’re exceptionally bad at implementing strategies, despite having hundreds of people working on it. The thing is though, that most of those people have read these articles and books, exactly like this one. So apparently knowing these things aren’t even helping us implement meaningful strategies.
After years in the bureaucracy I’ve long learned to simply keep quiet while these pseudo-workers do their thing, and then get things done when they leave. Then you can always word the work up to sound like it plays into whatever current strategy we’re pursuing at the end of the year review.
I looked it up, it appears the title has been translated into English. Morten Münster, I'm Afraid Debbie From Marketing Has Left for the Day - How to Use Behavioural Design to Create Change in the Real World, Translated from Danish by Helen Dyrbye, Gyldendal Business, 2019
I presume the bureacratic decision makers design these strategies exactly for what you use them for.
They have to do something, and they have to demonstrate it costs money and effort.
So they hire a bunch of externs with the intent of producing powerpoints, and put some buts in seats before them. Get someone to create some procedures and buy or build some software to support it. Money has been spent, which proves beyond doubt the problem has been solved.
Meanwhile the actual workers can do actual work, and the strategy is vague enough that everybody can demonstrate to have done something.
There's also a CYA element to a degree, in that the person actually in charge can blame the development process or execution of the "strategy" (optionally along with one or more of the people who were nominally in charge of those things) if their attempt goes awry.
one of my more sarcastic personalities derives great pleasure in comparing what's happening in the workplace with what's described as effective sabotage in the CIA's field manual.
That is a great/hilarious post, even if the title is wrong.
(The CIA did not yet exist in 1944; The manual is likely from the OSS, which was roughly the wartime predecessor of the CIA.)
Total nitpick: You-tay is very far from how the name Jytte is pronounced. In IPA it'd be ['jydə] I think. You-dah would be closer, in the sense that she might look up if you'd say that :-)
But English doesn't have the [y] so it's hard to explain. Even harder that the y in Jytte is kind of halfway [y] and [œ]. Somewhere between the vowel in "few" and the "i" in Cockney "bird".
The title of the English translation of the book is "I'm Afraid Debbie From Marketing Has Left for the Day: How to Use Behavioural Design to Create Change in the Real World".
One thing about the public sector is every task of a public body is important or mandatory to some degree. This means that most strategies are necessarily overly broad and that they don't have the freedom to pivot away from or deprioritize anything.
"forward together" is not a strategy, it's a slogan. Of course if your management can't tell the difference, you have a much bigger issue than simply a lack of strategy.
Reminds me when Ballmer changed MS's original mission statement from "A computer on every desk and in every home" to "enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential". One clearly defines a victory condition, the other is nebulous BS. It accurately reflects that Ballmer had no vision whatsoever except for counting money.
“Focusing is about saying ‘no,‘” Jobs explained at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). “You’ve got to say ‘no, no, no’ and when you say ‘no,’ you piss people off.”
A strategic plan must also have decision points and alternatives laid out. Not just a direction. Not just the logic behind. What to do when X happens; how far to reach when goals are not being met; how much to spend.
As a mostly-solo entrepreneur / consultant, I've had some success in shifting professional engagements toward the "strategic consulting" end of the spectrum. I credit author R. Rumelt ("Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"), and FB VP Product J. Zhao ("How to be Strategic") for excellent perspective and actionable advice, which distills down to:
A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective.
The actions need to be credible, coherent, and focused.
Designing them properly takes hard work.
The most practical path to actually being strategic:
1. "Wild Success":
Create alignment around what it looks like
2. "Problems / Whose":
Deeply grok problem space and its ecosys, and be crystal clear abt what problems looking to solve, and for whom.
3. Prioritize:
Focus means saying "no". Cut, ruthlessly, anything inessential.
Working on applying these ideas outside work context, too.
> A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective.
Yes. I have seen people at my work make that same error that you describe.
It took the form of a bullet point in a presentation, "our strategy is to migrate to the Foo platform, for these (valid) reasons".
And I couldn't help thinking: That is a good goal, but it won't happen unless you make it happen. You don't have a strategy for that goal until you allocate time to it, set milestones, get buy-in from below, get management to tell people to it, decide which teams will go first, etc. Without that, all you have is a vague aspiration. Not a strategy.
Getting to the details of the strategy means committing to doing something even though there is effort involved, and since available effort is short supply, that means you have to choose.
What "error"? That definition comes straight from Richard Rumelt who wrote one of the all-time most influential books on strategy. And of _course_ you have to actually take action and not merely talk about it! That goes without saying. If you read the rest of my comment, you'll see I mention the same things you do, in similar words! "it takes hard work", "create alignment", "prioritize... saying no" etc.
Hard to tell if you're just trolling. Responded anyway just in case you simply rushed to make a point w/out noticing
you'd entirely missed mine.
I think it's good to assume they are not trolling. I've seen this very thing happen in a few departments at my org. They say, it's great to do this thing and we plan on doing it.. without actually making any concrete plans (assigning time/people, pushing back other projects, making it a priority, etc.)
So when this happens, I wonder if they are incompetent, gas-lighting people or if there are other politics in play.
>I've seen this very thing happen in a few departments at my org. They say, it's great to do this thing and we plan on doing it.
Exactly that. I have a clear memory of a presentation from about a year ago, the presenter claiming to have a strategy where there was none. it must be common.
IDK why chrisweekly is upset, but I was not criticising their first post.
@Sideburns, at this point I have to conclude you are pretending not to understand.
Here's what happened:
1. I wrote a comment, summarizing 2 experts' views on "strategy".
2. You responded to my comment, quoting one line (Rumelt's definition), then saying something like "I've seen this error before." -- which made no sense because neither the definition you quoted, nor my full comment, made any reference to any error. Thus your comment seemed like trolling.
3. For some reason I responded (still in good faith) attempting to clarify.
4. Then you edited your comment, changing the meaning of your opening sentence to which I'd responded. (Note it is still illogical / incorrect, bc I never mentioned an error, but at least it's less ambiguous.)
5. Then others reading the thread for the 1st time saw what looked like my inexplicable confusion about the ambiguity which you'd removed by editing your comment...
6. Then you double down here by claiming you don't know why I might be annoyed.
I fear I'm guilty of feeding a troll, and hate to post a boring meta comment like this, but that's what happened. What a waste of time.... Apologies to mods and other readers.
> Then you edited your comment, changing the meaning of your opening sentence to which I'd responded.
I apologize for writing something in haste that was open to misinterpretation. I think that I made the correct call to then edit it so the intended meaning was much clearer. Not for your sake in any way, but to better discuss a common issue in workplaces, with other people who will care about that, won't necessarily care about this rabbithole.
I'm sorry that you didn't grasp what I was trying to say, but I suggest that you don't throw words like "troll" and "pretending not to understand" around so freely. It's not helpful. You're very defensive, and that language provokes the same response. Let's end this conversation already.
I think the misunderstanding comes from here. chrisweekly doesn't seem to describe any error in the original post, only their own approach, hence assuming you were calling that an error.
Of course I did. It was "edited for clarity". You were misunderstanding it, and that indicates that other people might as well. So a better wording for what I was trying to say was needed.
If you’re interested in this topic, the best book I’ve read is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It’s an excellent read. Here’s the main takeaway:
A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the “kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a strategy.
1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity.
2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond.
3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the strategy.
I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.
Also "Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works" by the old CEO of procter and gamble and the dean of the toronto business school. In addition to good strategy / bad strategy, playing to win is sort of heads and shoulder above anything else strategy related and on the level of the legendary grove and porter books. Strongly recommend as well.
I also like "Strategy in Action" for more concrete / less abstract thinkers more focused on execution. These people shouldn't be working on company strategy, but this step-by-step approach is a good fit for them I think.
If you read the book, the author would frame that in the context of the diagnosis and guiding policy. The diagnosis says what is wrong, or what the opportunity is, in precise terms. That eliminates most actions by making them obviously irrelevant. The guiding policy further narrows scope and may explicitly include the things you’re not doing.
But I think the big takeaway is that strategy is neither goals nor actions, and thus not a list of what to do or what not to do. Rather, strategy is a precisely defined diagnosis of a problem and a specific response carefully designed to leverage your strengths / advantages against the problem. If you have that, then the answer to what you’re not doing is very clear: “anything else.”
Honestly I don’t think Good Strategy Bad Strategy would be all that helpful for personal goals. It’s focus is very much on large teams / organizations tackling hard problems.
For personal goals, I’d take a look at Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s a pretty good rundown of personal behavior and behavior change, with a lot of easy, hands-on guidance on how to set and achieve personal goals.
This article does feel like an echo of Rumelt's Good Strategy Bad Strategy.
One problem that Rumelt raises is that of information. How do you come to know enough that you can reach a diagnosis?
If deciding on a strategy is the problem to be solved, then gathering the right information is the problem before the problem to be solved.
Secondly, if many people are familiar with these ideas, and their organizations are still not able to decide on an effective strategy, then there is a deeper and more interesting problem: how do you build groups of people that are able to reach good decisions together?
Strategy is choices we make to achieve a goal. Those choices represent implied utility through the reduction in optionality.
Executing a strategy means making the trade offs between utility and opportunity cost, to arrive at a prioritization of choices, and then realizing those opportunity costs.
I used to read a lot about strategy, but it didn't feel like I was getting anywhere.
The thing is, it's such a big topic, and so context-dependent, that so many "conversations about strategy" end up with the conversants either talking past each other, with Bob and Alice using the same words but meaning different things by them. This is how consultants get their reputations as purveyors of fluff---either the consultant is a space cadet and is talking about generalities without translation into the clients' reality, or the client is not understanding (or not listening to!) the consultant, who is later maligned as a purveyor of fluff.
A lot of the problem stems from people thinking and talking at different layers of abstraction. We all suck at talking about strategy, but programmers are probably the best at understanding why we suck.
For most people, most of the time, we're better off staying concrete.
“If there is one thing I have learned about communicating choices, it is that we always focus on what the choices are. I now realize you have to spend at least as much time on explaining the logic behind the choices.”
This is a great thing to keep in mind for engineering architecture and policy.
All this stuff is so obvious, why does it even need to be written down? It's hard to believe that people don't know this intuitively.
I guess there are so many highly paid bureaucrats who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it that such basic articles have become a necessity.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadMaybe the best place to see this is sports. How often have you been playing a match, and at some point the coach says "we need to score a goal"? As if that's not obvious. What he needs to say is "keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass".
A strategy is tripartite. The Strategy, it's Guiding Principles and Actions (tactics)
A strategy takes into account the environment within which one is working and to view it as a dynamic thing. In your football example we might be able to say that the dynamic part of the game is how the opposition arranges their players and who is in which position.
Knowing this we can define some Guiding Principles for the individual game. One might choose a loaded and strong defence as your team's offence is not as strong as the oppositions defence. The guiding principle is "Defend our ground"
Actions (tactics) would be "Keep the few strikers far forward and protect the defenders"
Caveat: I'm not a footballer, and I wish I had written this to end up with the original tactic mentioned "Keep a high line and only let the defenders take time to pass"
I would not say a strategy alone achieves nothing - its actually quite the opposite the larger your "team" and scope of activity is. A lot of business decisions are not related to having a tactic but are a trade off between two important things (like cost and quality). Having a clear strategy allows people in your company to arrive at the same decision for which side of that trade-off to favor - which increases individual autonomy. For example, a high volume strategy leads to favoring low cost. A strategy to be scalable might favor higher upfront costs since cheap non-scalable options are removed from review. In both cases, when an option doesnt fit the strategy it is not considered an option. So your decision pool is reduced. Sometimes this reduction is enough that the choice is made for you. Especially when accounting for multiple strategies and company initiatives.
Tactics are a different beast. Sometimes a tactic involves going against the general strategy, but is approved because there is confident calculation behind it and the expected result is wanted. The most important thing here is the calculation. It takes time and energy to develop and communicate a tactic. Those things are limited, so you can only be working on so many tactics at once, and only so many people are qualified to be doing that work (because those job titles are expensive).
The critical factor here is that the volume of decisions that need to be made across an organization on a day-to-day basis are not bound by how much time you have to develop a tactic for each of them. So you have to trust the autonomy of your company hierarchy at each level to be able to make default decisions that dont interfere with company strategy. A strategy alone is enough to help keep a loose handle on things.. it goes a long way to preventing chaos.
You might end up with a cashier accepting a return on something that is obviously not a valid return, but the overall strategy of being return-friendly is maintained. You also dont end up with a fist-fight between your cashier and the customer (extreme alternative example). When you have time, you develop a tactic for validating returns with order#'s or receipts, etc. but maybe your tactic team is busy dealing with warehouse optimizations this month
The way I have always thought of strategy, though, is that it should be directional. Say what input variables you think we should increase or decrease, in order to get closer to the optimum, relative to where we are currently.
Taking your example of cost vs. quality. Obviously we want to find an optimum. If a manager can state which direction we need to move in and why, to make progress toward the optimum, I will take their strategy seriously. But if they just tell their people to "optimize," I dismiss them as having no strategy. A manager who's responsible for formulating and communicating a strategy, has to at least have an opinion about which side of the curve we're currently on.
Early in my career I was an analyst at an ocean shipping company--lower rates meant fuller ships, higher rates meant better unit margin but lower utilization. Corporate's strategic message? "Fill up the ships with high-paying cargo." It became a joke among the employees.
My current thinking is that people tend to think of strategy as higher level than tactics, but that there's never a clear line that tells you which you are looking at. It's more the importance you want to give some decision that determines what you call it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess#Strategy_and_tactics
They are very well understood and delineated within that context.
Start-ups sorta get this already: focus on a core base of customers who love your product despite its flaws. Iterate.
The insight I liked best in this article was, “In contrast, top executives should resist the temptation to decide what projects live and die within their firms. Strategy implementation requires top managers to design the company’s internal system that does the selection for them.”
So much your job as an exec is to design the system that gives others enough context and autonomy to flourish.
And hopefully over time that system continues to improve itself.
Part recursive. Part dog-fooding.
It agrees with this article, and I always find it kind of hilarious. I do work on the public sector, and we’re exceptionally bad at implementing strategies, despite having hundreds of people working on it. The thing is though, that most of those people have read these articles and books, exactly like this one. So apparently knowing these things aren’t even helping us implement meaningful strategies.
After years in the bureaucracy I’ve long learned to simply keep quiet while these pseudo-workers do their thing, and then get things done when they leave. Then you can always word the work up to sound like it plays into whatever current strategy we’re pursuing at the end of the year review.
They have to do something, and they have to demonstrate it costs money and effort.
So they hire a bunch of externs with the intent of producing powerpoints, and put some buts in seats before them. Get someone to create some procedures and buy or build some software to support it. Money has been spent, which proves beyond doubt the problem has been solved.
Meanwhile the actual workers can do actual work, and the strategy is vague enough that everybody can demonstrate to have done something.
https://corporate-rebels.com/cia-field-manual/
tip for pro's : you can play the bingo version too!
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...
But English doesn't have the [y] so it's hard to explain. Even harder that the y in Jytte is kind of halfway [y] and [œ]. Somewhere between the vowel in "few" and the "i" in Cockney "bird".
Got it from a web site on names. I guess they were sloppy on the phonetic rendering.
Not enough due diligence on my part.
A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective.
The actions need to be credible, coherent, and focused.
Designing them properly takes hard work.
The most practical path to actually being strategic:
1. "Wild Success": Create alignment around what it looks like
2. "Problems / Whose": Deeply grok problem space and its ecosys, and be crystal clear abt what problems looking to solve, and for whom.
3. Prioritize: Focus means saying "no". Cut, ruthlessly, anything inessential.
Working on applying these ideas outside work context, too.
Yes. I have seen people at my work make that same error that you describe.
It took the form of a bullet point in a presentation, "our strategy is to migrate to the Foo platform, for these (valid) reasons".
And I couldn't help thinking: That is a good goal, but it won't happen unless you make it happen. You don't have a strategy for that goal until you allocate time to it, set milestones, get buy-in from below, get management to tell people to it, decide which teams will go first, etc. Without that, all you have is a vague aspiration. Not a strategy.
Getting to the details of the strategy means committing to doing something even though there is effort involved, and since available effort is short supply, that means you have to choose.
Hard to tell if you're just trolling. Responded anyway just in case you simply rushed to make a point w/out noticing you'd entirely missed mine.
You're totally misreading. You made no error in your first post, I was agreeing with you.
The error is people not understanding what a strategy is. A strategy is a plan of action, not merely a goal.
So that no-one can possibly misunderstand I will rephrase that as "I have seen people at my work make that same error that you describe".
In general, it's not good for you to respond, clearly upset but not understanding, in the heat of the moment like that.
> Hard to tell if you're just trolling. Responded anyway just in case you simply rushed to make a point w/out noticing you'd entirely missed mine.
That's not a nice way to respond, at all, to someone who is corroborating. Quite ironic, though.
So when this happens, I wonder if they are incompetent, gas-lighting people or if there are other politics in play.
Exactly that. I have a clear memory of a presentation from about a year ago, the presenter claiming to have a strategy where there was none. it must be common.
IDK why chrisweekly is upset, but I was not criticising their first post.
1. I wrote a comment, summarizing 2 experts' views on "strategy".
2. You responded to my comment, quoting one line (Rumelt's definition), then saying something like "I've seen this error before." -- which made no sense because neither the definition you quoted, nor my full comment, made any reference to any error. Thus your comment seemed like trolling.
3. For some reason I responded (still in good faith) attempting to clarify.
4. Then you edited your comment, changing the meaning of your opening sentence to which I'd responded. (Note it is still illogical / incorrect, bc I never mentioned an error, but at least it's less ambiguous.)
5. Then others reading the thread for the 1st time saw what looked like my inexplicable confusion about the ambiguity which you'd removed by editing your comment...
6. Then you double down here by claiming you don't know why I might be annoyed.
I fear I'm guilty of feeding a troll, and hate to post a boring meta comment like this, but that's what happened. What a waste of time.... Apologies to mods and other readers.
I apologize for writing something in haste that was open to misinterpretation. I think that I made the correct call to then edit it so the intended meaning was much clearer. Not for your sake in any way, but to better discuss a common issue in workplaces, with other people who will care about that, won't necessarily care about this rabbithole.
I'm sorry that you didn't grasp what I was trying to say, but I suggest that you don't throw words like "troll" and "pretending not to understand" around so freely. It's not helpful. You're very defensive, and that language provokes the same response. Let's end this conversation already.
I think the misunderstanding comes from here. chrisweekly doesn't seem to describe any error in the original post, only their own approach, hence assuming you were calling that an error.
A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the “kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a strategy.
1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity.
2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond.
3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the strategy.
I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.
I also like "Strategy in Action" for more concrete / less abstract thinkers more focused on execution. These people shouldn't be working on company strategy, but this step-by-step approach is a good fit for them I think.
Also nice, they're all on Audible.
But I think the big takeaway is that strategy is neither goals nor actions, and thus not a list of what to do or what not to do. Rather, strategy is a precisely defined diagnosis of a problem and a specific response carefully designed to leverage your strengths / advantages against the problem. If you have that, then the answer to what you’re not doing is very clear: “anything else.”
For personal goals, I’d take a look at Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s a pretty good rundown of personal behavior and behavior change, with a lot of easy, hands-on guidance on how to set and achieve personal goals.
One problem that Rumelt raises is that of information. How do you come to know enough that you can reach a diagnosis?
If deciding on a strategy is the problem to be solved, then gathering the right information is the problem before the problem to be solved.
Secondly, if many people are familiar with these ideas, and their organizations are still not able to decide on an effective strategy, then there is a deeper and more interesting problem: how do you build groups of people that are able to reach good decisions together?
And it's not enough to simply encourage argument, as Dalio would suggest: https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy
Executing a strategy means making the trade offs between utility and opportunity cost, to arrive at a prioritization of choices, and then realizing those opportunity costs.
The thing is, it's such a big topic, and so context-dependent, that so many "conversations about strategy" end up with the conversants either talking past each other, with Bob and Alice using the same words but meaning different things by them. This is how consultants get their reputations as purveyors of fluff---either the consultant is a space cadet and is talking about generalities without translation into the clients' reality, or the client is not understanding (or not listening to!) the consultant, who is later maligned as a purveyor of fluff.
A lot of the problem stems from people thinking and talking at different layers of abstraction. We all suck at talking about strategy, but programmers are probably the best at understanding why we suck.
For most people, most of the time, we're better off staying concrete.
This is a great thing to keep in mind for engineering architecture and policy.
I guess there are so many highly paid bureaucrats who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it that such basic articles have become a necessity.