Good Strategy Bad Strategy

---
name: good-strategy-bad-strategy
description: 'Formulate and audit real strategy using Richard Rumelt''s "Good Strategy Bad Strategy": an honest diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action instead of goals, vision, and wishful thinking. Use when the user mentions "good strategy bad strategy", "strategy kernel", "diagnosis guiding policy coherent action", "our strategy is just goals", "strategic planning", "mission vs strategy", "annual plan", or "is this actually a strategy". Also trigger when auditing a strategy doc or pitch deck for fluff, turning a goal list into real strategy, formulating strategy for a product or company, or finding leverage and proximate objectives. Covers the kernel of strategy, bad-strategy detection, and sources of power. For product positioning, see obviously-awesome. For uncontested markets, see blue-ocean-strategy.'
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: wondelai
  version: "1.2.0"
---

# 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 — aimed at a pivot point, with an explicit list of what will not be done
- **7-8 (6-7 pass):** Kernel present but one element weak: thin diagnosis, a policy that rules little out, or actions not yet coordinated and funded
- **5-6 (4-5 pass):** The challenge is named, but the plan is a list of independent initiatives and some goals masquerade as strategy
- **3-4 (2-3 pass):** Mostly goals, targets, and vision statements; no diagnosis; fluff in key passages; nothing ruled out