A few months ago, I raced through Richard Rumelt’s book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.
Curious about business strategy, I had been looking for a book that was more than just a compilation of business case studies. Case studies are great—but I wanted to go deeper—how were these business leaders thinking? what was the structure there?
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy more than delivered, and I’ve been mulling my notes on the book ever since.
Rumelt commits a sizeable chunk of the book—and this is no surprise, given the title—to tearing down “bad straetgy.” He observes three routes to bad strategy, including what he calls “template strategy”:
A second pathway to bad strategy is the siren song of template-style strategy—filling in the blanks with vision, mission, values, and strategies. This path offers a one-size-fits-all substitute for the hard work of analysis and coordinated action.
Um.
Sounds a little like the firm I work for?
And I get it! It’s satisfying to work with a template. You have blanks, and you fill them in. You look at the completed template, and you know what you need to do next.
Or do you?
Vision and mission sound great. But are they? Do they really point us anywhere?
This template-style planning has been enthusiastically adopted by corporations, school boards, university presidents, and government agencies. Scan through these documents and you will find pious statements of the obvious presented as if they were decisive insights.
A little deflating, that.
I work for a firm with a vision dedicated to “delivering great design.”
I’m not sure it says anything specific about our firm. There’s certainly no decisive insight there.
Rumelt observes, “Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.”
So what are we choosing not to do by choosing to pursue great design?
This is rhetorical, obviously. There’s nothing we’re choosing not to do, in any meaningful sense.
Back to the issue of template strategy, Rumelt made one observation that shook me:
This conceptual scheme has been hugely popular with college-educated people who have to manage other college-educated people. It satisfies their sense that organizations should somehow be forced to change and improve while also satisfying their contradictory sense that it is awkward to tell other people what to do.
Template strategy is just another symptom of the delegation challenge that befuddles so many professional service firms at the higher levels. People find it awkward to order around their peers. Template strategy is a canny substitute for the “transformational leader” who inspires people to follow them.
Template strategy is a butterfly net for our various passion projects. As long as we can find a home in the template for our pet project, then we can call it part of the firm’s overall strategy.
And that doesn’t feel like strategy, does it?
Taylor Coe 