Bad strategy is the name for a document that carries the word strategy and contains no argument.
Richard Rumelt named the category in Good Strategy Bad Strategy, published in 2011, and gave it four hallmarks. These are fluff, failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy and bad strategic objectives. Each hallmark is the kernel with one part taken out, so the four sit directly on the structure the previous page set out.
That makes the kernel a reading tool as well as a writing tool. Most strategy reaches a product manager already written by somebody else, as a deck from a founder, a page in a board pack or a set of themes handed down in January. Naming which of the three parts is missing from one of those documents turns an uneasy feeling about it into a finding somebody can act on.
The sections below take the four hallmarks in Rumelt's order, each one set against the part of the kernel it leaves out. They then show what each hallmark looks like in a product document. Finally they turn the four into a short reading of a document somebody has handed over.
Fluff in a strategy document
Fluff is the first of the four. A document carrying fluff restates the obvious in vocabulary that sounds expert. Rumelt's example is a retail bank whose strategy memorandum described the bank's fundamental strategy as intermediation centred on the customer. At the time, the only intermediation the bank performed was taking deposits from one customer and lending the money to another. Once the covering comes off, Rumelt writes, the statement reads "our fundamental strategy is being a bank".
The product version of that bank's sentence uses different vocabulary and has the same shape. A strategy might say that the team will become the trusted platform for modern finance teams through an integrated experience. Nothing could ever make that claim false. Every word in it would survive if the product were a payroll tool or an expenses tool. Substitution is the test for fluff. If a sentence stays true when a competitor's name is swapped in, it says nothing about this organisation.
Failure to face the challenge
A sentence like that names no difficulty either, and a strategy is a way through a difficulty. If the difficulty is never named, nobody can judge the document at all. There is no obstacle to test the approach against, so agreement is the only response left.
That agreement arrives most often in documents that read as competent work. A hardware company's gross margin had fallen for six quarters in a row, and its leadership published a plan built on three growth initiatives, an investment in brand and a commitment to customer excellence. The margin appeared nowhere in that plan. Nothing in the plan was false. No reader could tell whether the company had understood why the margin was falling, so nobody could argue that the three initiatives were the wrong answer.
Mistaking goals for strategy
A plan that names no answer usually carries an ambition. Ambition is what fills the gap when the quarter is closing and nobody has an approach. When a leadership team is long on goals and short on policy, it has said where it wants to arrive and left the route out. Rumelt calls that fault mistaking goals for strategy.
The product version is a strategy document holding three targets, which are a target for weekly active users, a target for retention at ninety days and a target for revenue per account. Three numbers describe a destination and say nothing about how to reach it. A team asked to raise weekly active users can chase notifications. A team asked to raise revenue per account can push customers onto a higher tier they will regret. Neither team is disobeying the document. The guiding policy is the part that would have ruled those routes out.
Bad strategic objectives
Objectives sit below the guiding policy and turn it into work, so they go wrong in the two ways Rumelt names. Dog's dinner objectives are the long list of things to do that a planning meeting produces when everybody in the room adds a suggestion and nobody takes one away. Blue sky objectives repeat the outcome the team wants, as though saying it were a step towards reaching it.
Dog's dinner objectives look like a quarterly plan carrying nineteen initiatives across five teams. The fault there is coherence. Nineteen items funded at a fifth of what each one needs support one another in no way at all. If the stated objective is to become the market leader in onboarding, the plan is blue sky. The objective just repeats the challenge in different words, and an objective as hard as the problem it answers has added nothing.
The four hallmarks against the kernel
| Hallmark | The kernel part it lacks | What a reader sees |
|---|---|---|
| Fluff | Diagnosis, replaced by vocabulary | Sentences that stay true when a competitor's name is substituted |
| Failure to face the challenge | Diagnosis, left out | A plan with no account of what is going wrong |
| Mistaking goals for strategy | Guiding policy | Targets with no approach, so any route to the number qualifies |
| Bad strategic objectives | Coherent actions | Nineteen initiatives, or one objective as hard as the problem |
The two rows to check first are the diagnosis rows. A document can pick up a guiding policy and a set of objectives during a review and still have no diagnosis underneath them. A reader working down the table finds the missing part faster than a reader arguing with the content. The finding is also specific enough to act on, because a missing diagnosis names the work the author still has to do.
Reading a document somebody has handed over
The work of that reading comes down to four questions.
- What does this document claim is going wrong, in terms a colleague could dispute.
- What approach has been chosen for dealing with it, and which reasonable proposals does that approach refuse.
- Do the actions support one another, so that money spent on one makes the next cheaper.
- Would any sentence here survive if a competitor's name replaced this organisation's.
The order matters. A document that fails the first question cannot be repaired by improving the other three. A team that answers the first question honestly usually finds the strategy rewrites itself.
All four hallmarks are faults in the form of a strategy. A document can be clear of every one of them and still be the wrong document. A product strategy borrows its terms from a company strategy above it, and it passes terms down to a roadmap and a set of goals below it. The place a strategy holds in that order decides what it may choose for itself and what it has to take as given.