Contrast this to 7 Powers, where the takeaway (for those who understand or have experienced competitive arbitrage):
- there are really only 7 types of economic moats, or ‘Powers’
- there are at most 3 Powers you may build at a given stage
- Power comes from discovery+execution
Conversation
I haven’t fully figured out why the book is so useless.
I think it’s some combination of:
- Rumelt has good points to make about what good strategy looks like. But so what?
- His proposed method to get to one doesn’t tackle the hardest bit, which is context-dependent diagnosis
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- The framework doesn’t carve the problem at the joints, reducing it to the core question you must answer for strategy to work (beat the competition)
- As a result it feels actionable but it isn’t, really.
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The reason I say ‘90% convinced’ is because of the “here is what bad strategy looks like” piece — which is genuinely useful as a pattern matching example.
But that’s the limit, I think:
- sufficiently thoughtful execs should know this
- what to do instead? Book has 0 clue.
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Yes that was the bit I found useful, as very few senior leadership teams know this or if they do know it they don’t want conflict amongst themselves so a big list of vague objectives appears very quickly. Context is invariably absent or minimized. Suggestion for a better guide?
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Hnm, what’s the context for which you’d like an alternative? I was going to recommend 7 Powers, but it really only helps wrt resisting competitive arbitrage (the central problem in business).
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I think anything that directly addresses where edu strategic planning tends to be weakest that covers some of the following: identifying and countering opposition, not confusing noise and signal in market analysis, importance of (healthy) internal conflict in finalizing plans etc
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HMM. I don’t have any good recommendations for this, but I’ll keep an eye out.
To flip this a bit, could you recommend me books you’ve found useful for your strategic context? I’d be curious to see what else is out there in your domain.
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Well oddly, one non edu general one that I’ve found really useful over the years and keep coming back to is the US Marine book Warfighting. It’s been extremely thought provoking and there’s always some new bit to to apply as one gets more experienced. In terms of a more specific
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So for more specific I’ve found for market analysis thinking on the distinction between proximal and ultimate causes of behaviors very useful and often completely ignored. Schools tend to do what other schools do which in int schools seems a bad idea as it removes local context
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You’ll love it and it’s very short, like a western Sun Tzu. It was written post cold war as the marines were looking for a new role etc but really so transferable especially the importance of planning for training etc as part of overall strategy etc
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