Good Strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt
The reason most public affairs strategies fail isn't that the team didn't have time. It's that no one in the room was willing to inflict the pain that strategy requires.
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“Bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or the difficulty of choice.”
— Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy
I have produced the dog’s dinner more often than I’d like to admit.
Dog’s dinner is Richard Rumelt’s term for a specific kind of failure. It usually starts with the desire to demonstrate that the team has been thoughtful. The file is complex, the client is sophisticated, and we want them to see that we’ve done the work. So we hit them with appendices, stakeholder maps, decision trees, tables that cross-reference jurisdictions and influence vectors and timing windows. The deck swells from twelve slides to fifty-six. By the time we’re done, the document is a monument to how complicated the situation is.
The client signs off. They thank us for the rigour. We feel like we’ve delivered.
We haven’t. We’ve delivered a wall of complexity that proves the team has been busy and produces no decision the client can actually act on.
For a long time I told myself this was just the cost of doing complex work. In truth, the wall of appendices isn’t what the file required. It’s what I produced when I avoided the actual work.
The actual work is the kernel: diagnose what’s going on, decide what’s pivotal, refuse the rest, concentrate the result. That often takes a single page, not fifty-six slides.
Rumelt spent forty years inside boardrooms as a consultant and a UCLA Anderson School professor, watching organisations produce documents called “strategy” that he’d argue weren’t strategies at all. Good Strategy Bad Strategy, published in 2011, sits at the centre of a serious strategy reading list because it takes a structural question seriously: what makes something a strategy at all.
Most strategies fail, Rumelt argues, because senior leaders make small political accommodations that, in aggregate, replace the strategy work with something else. Something that satisfies more people in the room, hurts no one’s interests, something everyone can sign.
“Universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice.”
Put another way: death by consensus.
Why This Book Matters
Almost every public affairs leader — including me — has produced what Rumelt would call bad strategy. A coalition assembles around a regulatory file. Five member companies, each with their own priorities. The strategy session runs. The deck grows. By the end, the document lists eight strategic objectives, twenty-three priority actions, and a stakeholder map covering forty entities. The internal political problem has been solved. The strategy problem has been avoided.
Strategy, in Rumelt’s framing, is scarcity’s child. Without the constraint of having to choose, there is no strategy — only a list of things the organisation hopes will happen.
The diagnostic test Rumelt offers is the kernel. Any real strategy has three irreducible parts:
A diagnosis of what’s actually going on
A guiding policy for how to deal with it
A set of coherent actions that carry the policy forward
Pull one out and the strategy stops being a strategy. The piece most often missing is the first, because diagnosing means choosing — saying that one factor matters more than another, knowing the second factor has a constituency in the room who’ll be disappointed. Diagnosing creates losers. The room is full of people who don’t want to lose.
If your organisation isn’t producing good strategy, the first place to look isn’t the team or the framework. It’s the leader. Strategy work can be delegated. Choice cannot. Choice creates losers in the room, and only the leader has the political authority to absorb that cost. The leader’s job is to refuse the document everyone can sign and send it back. To inflict the pain the team will not inflict on itself.
The audiences we’re trying to influence — ministers, deputy ministers, regulators, board members — are drowning in information and short on time. Clarity is in short supply, and simplicity is the biggest gift you can give. The wall of appendices is what you produce when you want to be seen to have done the work. Simplicity is what you produce when you’ve actually done it.
What We Cover in the Episode
Episode 8 of Masters in Public Affairs is a deep walk through Rumelt’s argument and its application to our field. Some of what we cover:
The core idea — a strategy is a coherent response to an important challenge — and why every word in that sentence is doing exclusionary work.
The kernel as the minimum-viable shape of any real strategy: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions. The kernel works as a structural test. Take any document calling itself a strategy and ask: where’s the diagnosis, where’s the guiding policy, where are the actions? If you can’t find all three, you don’t have a strategy. You have something else with the wrong label on it.
The four mechanisms that translate most directly to public affairs work: the kernel itself, concentration and the threshold effect, the proximate objective (and Rumelt’s counter-intuitive case for shorter planning horizons under high uncertainty), and the asymmetry move — Andy Marshall and James Roche’s 1976 Pentagon memo and how it applies to industry-vs-NGO regulatory fights today.
Four mental models: the kernel, the pivot point, the long clock, and the dog’s dinner.
Four common misreadings of the book — the most consequential being the assumption that bad strategy is a failure of effort.
Four modern applications, including the consultant’s dog’s dinner, pulsing in regulatory work, proximate objectives in the legislative cycle, and the asymmetry move under the long clock.
Listen and subscribe here:
Bonus: Four Ideas From the Book That Didn’t Make the Episode
The book has more in it than even a sixty-five minute episode could carry. Four ideas from my highlights that didn’t make the cut.
