good-strategy-bad-strategy

Good Strategy Bad Strategy is a framework skill for formulating and auditing real strategy, distilled from Richard Rumelt's book of the same name. It solves a pervasive problem: documents and pitch decks that pass as strategy but are actually goals, vision statements, and wishful thinking. Its core principle is that strategy is coherent action backed by an honest diagnosis, and that bad strategy is not merely the absence of strategy but an active substitute for it made of buzzword fluff, refusal to name the challenge, and laundry lists of initiatives.

The skill teaches the kernel of good strategy, a diagnosis that simplifies the critical challenge, a guiding policy that channels effort by ruling out options, and coherent actions that are coordinated and resource-backed, and it provides a reproducible scoring method. An eight-row Quick Diagnostic is walked row by row, counting how many pass to produce a 0-10 score with defined bands, along with the specific changes needed to reach 10/10. Reference files detect the four hallmarks of bad strategy (fluff, failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad strategic objectives) with concrete tests such as the plain-language restatement, the negation test, buzzword density, the verb audit, and the Monday test, and cover sources of power, case studies, and the dynamics of inertia. Before/after rewrites show how to convert goal lists into working kernels.

It targets founders, product leaders, and strategists who want to write real strategy, audit a strategy doc or pitch deck for fluff, or turn a goal list into diagnosis-guiding-policy-coherent-action. It is a benign conceptual and analytical guide with no code execution, external calls, or risky behavior.