Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Three of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Good Strategy Bad Strategy pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.

1. Build every strategy on the 'kernel': a sharp diagnosis of the core challenge, a guiding policy for how you'll meet it, and coherent actions that actually carry it out. If one piece is missing, you don't have a strategy.
2. Spot bad strategy by its four tells: fluff (dressing up the obvious in buzzwords), failure to face the real challenge, mistaking goals and wishes for a plan, and 'dog's dinner' objectives that don't connect to anything.
3. Diagnose before you decide. Most of the work is figuring out what's really going on, simplifying a messy situation into one or two pivotal problems you can actually act on.

The other 4 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 10 chapters

The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.

1. What Good Strategy Actually Is
2. The Four Hallmarks of Bad Strategy
3. The Kernel: Diagnosis, Guiding Policy, Coherent Action
4. Leverage: Concentrating Force on a Pivot Point
5. Proximate Objectives: Pick a Target You Can Hit
6. Chain-Link Systems: Mind Your Weakest Link
7. Design, Focus, and the Power of Coherence
8. Using Advantage, Dynamics, and Riding the Waves
9. Inertia and Entropy: Your Rival's Weakness, Your Own Risk
10. Thinking Like a Strategist