Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt: In his book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters, award-winning business professor Richard Rumelt highlights the widespread use of unnecessary “fluff” and grandiose goal-setting behavior in business strategy. He starts off with examples of bad strategies that substitute vague vision statements for a coherent, well thought-out plan. Rumelt argues that the essence of a winning strategy — or “kernel” as he calls it — is how well it plays into the following three key elements:

• An ongoing obstacle race: A strategist should always be looking towards upcoming challenges (obstacles) and providing the correct diagnosis of their size and nature.
• Adopting the appropriate overall approach, or guiding policy, to deal with the challenge (or challenges) on the horizon.
• Deploying a learned set of actions to implement the guiding policy.

All that glitters is not gold and business strategy is no exception. Vague, well-meaning statements of intent actually do more to obfuscate an issue than to clarify it, which makes forming a coherent strategy difficult. Rumelt highlights this point in a clear and articulate manner, making a practical distinction between strategies that “fail to acknowledge the key obstacles,” and those that bring challenges and ways to overcome themas a focal point of strategic and business success. You can read more here.