Good Strategy Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt

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A few years ago, actually more than a decade ago, I was working on a municipal campaign in Toronto and our candidate had the kind of strength that on paper every campaign manager might dream about. He had broad appeal. The conservatives in the city liked him. The liberals liked him. Even the progressive left could find things in this candidate that they could support.
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And in one way was the rare candidate who could hold a room of any composition and at some point get people in the room to nod along with him. Inside the campaign, that was treated as a strategic asset.
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Our message had to work for all of those constituencies at once, and our positioning had to be capacious enough that no one in the coalition felt left out. And our communications had to thread the needle every time we opened our mouths in public or every time that the candidate opened his mouth in public. The result was a campaign that...
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said or tried to say some true things about a lot of issues, language that was hyper-calibrated to not alienate each of those factions. And to us in the war room, it felt like sophisticated work. Every line was tested. Every position was pressure checked against each segment of the base. And the candidate looked like the most reasonable person in the race. But we were running against someone with a different challenge, different problem.
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at first blush, did not look like they had broad appeal. That candidate said stuff that at times was offensive, stuff that turned some heads. But they had a single, sharp, contested message. They had one issue, one theme. They took a hard approach with it in the language, and language that was not designed to please anyone except the voters that would
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already resonate with that type of message. And that other candidate was winning over all these different factions of the city, even though on paper he looked like he couldn't and wouldn't because of his message. Look, our team, our campaign, we lost.
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And you know who we lost to? We lost to Rob Ford, which is, for anyone who knows Toronto history, will find that particularly interesting. But I sat with that loss for a long time. The lesson I took from it was not tactical at all. It's that the broad appeal had been a feature of our own candidate's personality, but it wasn't a strategy. The truth is that the voters that we try to keep
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that we are constantly trying to appease, were never reliably with our candidate in the first place because there was a total lack of support.
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of clarity of our message. And if you've watched a campaign or a regulatory file lose despite an enormous amount of work, that diagnosis may sound familiar to you because trying to be all things to all people, I came to understand as a result of this campaign, is usually a failing strategy because breadth is what fills the space when no one has chosen what the strategy is actually about. That pattern,
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is at the center of the book we are working through today. Welcome to Public Affairs, I'm Joseph Lavoie. This is the show where we go deep on the foundational books in public affairs, the ones that contain the mental models, the first principles, the structural insights that the best practitioners return to again and again. If you're new here, the premise is simple.
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The best performers work the fundamentals in every field, athletics, music, medicine. The people at the top got there by obsessing over basics that many others consider beneath them. Public affairs, in my view, is no different, except that we don't have a shared curriculum. Most of us learn by improvising. The books that we're covering on this show are the ones that should be assigned reading from day one. And today's book is...
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Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rommelt, published in 2011. Rommelt spent his career as a professor at the USLA Anderson School of Management and as a working strategy consultant. Four decades inside boardrooms watching organizations produce documents called strategy that he would argue were far from. The first thing he said was,
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The book belongs in the canon for a specific reason, and that's that it takes a structural question seriously that I think very few other strategy books take as seriously. Not what makes a strategy good, but what makes something a strategy at all. And Ruhmelt's argument is that most of what gets produced under the label of strategy in our field and in any field fails that structural test.
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This book teaches you how to see the failure and then teaches you the shape of what's actually there and when a real strategy exists. And once you see the shape, you can't stop seeing it. You'll start finding it missing in client decks, in coalition documents, in government planning papers, and frankly, your own work.
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I certainly saw it in mine. If you've listened to episode six on recent Trout's positioning, this sits a layer deeper. So positioning asked what slot you hold in the audience's mind. Ruhmelt asked something more upstream, whether your organization has actually done the structural work or the structural work.
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or whether the document on the desk is a political artifact dressed up in strategy language. By structural work, I mean the three things he names as the kernel of every real strategy. They are, number one, a diagnosis of what's critical. Number two, an approach to dealing with it.
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and three coherent actions that follow. We'll come back to those three repeatedly throughout this episode. That structural work runs against almost everything about how organizations operate, right? Stakeholders want their issues represented. CEOs want optionality. Boards want goals they can measure and coalitions want every member to feel served. Each of those instincts is reasonable. Each working alone produces bad strategy.
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This is gonna take some patience that the argument is structural rather than tactical. Let's get into it. Ru Meltz didn't write this book to introduce a new framework. He wrote it because he kept watching the existing frameworks fail. By the time he sits down to write this book in the late 2000s, strategic planning had been a discipline for 40 years. Every large organization has a strategy. Every consultancy has a methodology. Every business school teaches it, and yet,
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Watching from the inside of dozens of these processes, what Ruhmelt sees most of the time isn't strategy. It's a rolling budget with market share projections, a vision statement, a list of goals, a set of values, all of it with the word strategy stamped on the cover. Bad strategy is more than just the absence of good strategy. Bad strategy has a life and logic of its own, a false edifice built on mistaken foundations.
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Bad strategy isn't an accident. It isn't a shortage of effort. It has its own logic, political organization, sometimes psychological, and it crowds out good strategy the way weeds crowd out grass. That's actually Ruhmelt's image, and I've come to use it increasingly in my own client work because I think it's the right one. You don't fight weeds by working harder on the lawn. You fight them by understanding what they are and why they keep coming back.
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The case that Rue Melt returns to most often and one that sits at the heart of this bad strategy diagnosis is Digital Equipment Corporation. If you're under 40 years old and don't recognize the name, DEC was at its peak in the 1980s, the second largest computer company in the world.
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Mainframes, mini computers, industry leadership, the personal computer revolution was breaking. The mainframe business was decaying and DEC CEO, Ken Olson, knew the company needed direction. So Olson did what most chief execs do when they need direction. He called his senior team into a room and asked them to reach a consensus. There were three serious factions in the room. One, wanting to bet on hardware. One, on software and services. One.
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one on a hybrid of the two, and each held the position fiercely. Each could produce a deck, the team worked the problem, drafted, redrafted, and eventually arrived at a statement everyone could sign. Here's a statement. DEC is committed to providing high-quality products and services and being a leader in data processing.
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If you read that again, notice how the hardware faction can read it and see hardware. The software faction can read it and see software. The hybrid faction can read it and see the hybrid. Nobody's pet position has been killed. Nobody's career has been bruised. The political problem has been solved. And within a decade, DEC was acquired by Compaq for a fraction of its peak value, having lost the personal computer market entirely.
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The obvious signal that DEC's executives picked the wrong direction is the wrong signal for us to take. They didn't pick a direction at all. The act of asking for consensus eliminated the possibility of strategy because strategy requires choice and consensus eliminates choice.
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The two cannot coexist. As soon as Olson asked his team to converge, the meeting stopped being a strategy meeting. It became a political negotiation that would produce a document called a strategy. Ruhmelt watched this pattern play out across the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s, not just in computer hardware, but in boardrooms and government departments and consulting engagements across the economy. He's careful to argue that the failure mode is structural. He's careful.
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It follows from how decisions get made when no one in the room is willing to impose a choice.
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The framing matters because many strategy books do skip this step entirely. They assume the reader is already trying to do good strategy and just needs better tools, a better framework, a different framework. Ruhmelt assumes the opposite. Most of what's labeled strategy isn't strategy at all. And the first job before any tools, before any frameworks, before any analysis is learning to see when it isn't there.
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40 years from when he started seeing it, his diagnosis may describe a lot of what will land on your desk this year or in the coming years. Once you see the missing strategy, you can see it everywhere in government documents, in coalition strategy decks, in your own work, if you're being honest.
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That's what Ruhmelt wants you to learn, how to recognize the difference. And so the next time the document on your desk is a political artifact, like that mission statement, that so-called strategy from DEC, dressed up in strategy language, you don't mistaken it for the real thing. Now, Ruhmelt's whole book hangs off a single sentence. A strategy is a coherent response to an important challenge. Now, in first read, that reads like common sense.
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It isn't. Every word in that sentence is doing work. And actually, a lot of it's doing exclusionary work. So the sentence is telling you what isn't a strategy as much as it's telling you what it is. Take the word coherent. A strategy isn't a list. It isn't a portfolio of priorities, each pick to keep a different stakeholder happy. Coherent means the moves fit together, each one earning its place because of what the others are doing alongside it. Very much like a puzzle.
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Take response. A strategy isn't a vision. It isn't a goal. It isn't a desired end state. A response answers something specific. If there's no challenge being responded to, what you have is an aspiration with a plan glued to the side of it. And then important challenge.
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Not every problem qualifies. A strategy is what you do about the one or two issues whose resolution actually changes the outcome. If you're treating everything as strategic, you're treating nothing as strategic. Same failure mode. So let's read that sentence again.
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A strategy is a coherent response to an important challenge. To make this concrete, I want to walk you through the case that Ruhmelt uses because it shows what coherence actually looks like when it works. And the case is the Gulf War Operation Desert Storm 1990 to 1991. And quick context for those who weren't paying attention at the time or probably weren't even born yet.
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Iraq under Saddam Hussein had invaded and annexed Kuwait. A coalition led by the United States was assembling in Saudi Arabia to expel them. And the commander of the coalition was an American general named Norman Schwarzkopf. The Iraqi army was, by the numbers, the fourth largest in the world.
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And Schwarzkopf's staff hands him a draft plan for the ground assault. It's a direct frontal attack into Kuwait. The casualty estimate for this plan is 2,000 dead, 8,000 wounded American soldiers. American casualties, that is. And Schwarzkopf rejects the plan. The math isn't the issue. The plan is a list of operational steps in service of a goal nobody has stress tested.
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So he goes back to the diagnosis. The Iraqi army's strength is its dug-in, 45 positions on the southern front facing Kuwait, exactly where the world's media is filming. Its weakness is a long exposed flank stretching westward into empty desert where Iraqi command isn't expecting an attack because the desert is supposed to be impassable. The U.S. coalition's strength is mobility, air dominance, and the world's attention being focused on the wrong place.
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So Schwarzkopf designs a different response in three coordinated parts. First, an air bombardment that grinds Iraqi capability down by roughly half, while also conditioning Iraqi troops to disperse and stay still, which makes the next move harder for them to detect.
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Second, while CNN keeps filming the Southern Front, a secret movement of 250,000 troops well to the west, then north into the empty desert. And third, when the ground war begins, a sweeping eastward turn, a left hook that lands on the Iraqi flank from a direction nobody was prepared for. The intense ground fighting lasts a hundred hours. The Iraqi army collapses.
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Now, here's what I want you to hold in your head about why this strategy is not just a clever plan. Pull any one piece and the others stop working. The air campaign matters because it prepares the conditions for the secret shift. The shift matters because the air campaign has reduced Iraqi capacity to react when it lands. And the eastward turn matters because the air and shift together created the asymmetry that made it decisive.
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That's coherence. Many documents that get called strategy don't pass that test. They look like plans. They list activities. They allocate budgets, but pull one piece out and nothing changes because the pieces weren't working together to begin with. They were just sitting next to each other on the same page. That's the architecture I want you to keep in mind for the rest of this episode.
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Now, Ruhmelt's book runs to about 300 pages. We're not going to go through all of it, obviously. We're going to look at four mechanisms, the four that transfer most directly to public affairs work. The first is the mechanism that holds everything else together. Ruhmelt calls it the kernel.
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And it is the irreducible structure of any real strategy. And it contains three parts. And I'm reading from the book now. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A guiding policy for dealing with a challenge. And a set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. So,
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diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions. Take any one of them out and a strategy stops being a strategy. They depend on each other. I'll walk you through each one because most documents I now see as a result of reading this book are...
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have the second and they have the third without really the first. And it's the absence of the first of the diagnosis is why often these strategies don't work. A diagnosis is a judgment about what's actually going on in the situation.
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Ruhmelt is careful to point out that it isn't deduction. The situation in front of you does not tell you what's wrong with it. You have to look at the noise, the stakeholder positions, the political pressures, the regulatory context, the data, and pick out the one or two factors that you believe are doing the work.
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Believe is the operative word here. You may be wrong. You may need to revise. But until you commit to a view about which factors are doing the work, the rest of the kernel has nothing to attach to. And this is much harder than it sounds because diagnosing means choosing. It means saying of two factors, this one matters more than that one.
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And that choice is the political problem because the second factor probably has a passionate constituency in the room who will be disappointed when their factor isn't centered. Most strategy sessions skip the diagnosis step for exactly that reason because diagnosing can create losers in the room and the room is full of people who don't want to lose.
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The guiding policy is what you do once you've diagnosed. It's an approach. It's a method, a way of grappling with a situation that rules out vast classes of action. Crucially, a guiding policy is not a goal.
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uses Wells Fargo as a contrast. He pulls their corporate vision off the website and reads it back to us, the reader. They want to justify all their customers' financial needs, help their customers succeed, be their premier provider of financial services in every market they're in, be known as one of America's great companies.
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That's a vision. It tells you everything the company wants and nothing about how any of it will actually happen. That's not a guiding policy. The guiding policy will tell you what not to do, which customers to walk away from, which markets to exit, where to focus,
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The signpost, not the destination. Coherent actions are the third piece. These aren't implementation details that get worked out by junior staff after the strategy is finalized. Ruhmelt is unusually emphatic on this point. He says, a good strategy includes a set of coherent actions. They are not implementation details. They are the punch in the strategy.
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The punch. That's the word he uses, and I think it's the right one. A guiding policy without the punch, without the actions coordinated to carry the policy into the world is wheel spinning. The reason most strategy documents in our field fail is that they collapse the kernel into a single part. Usually the guiding policy. They state an approach...
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without a diagnosis underneath and without coherent actions on top. The result reads like strategy and operates like wishful thinking. The first diagnostic question to ask of any strategy document, yours or someone else's, is, can I find the diagnosis? Not the goal, not the vision, not the action items, the diagnosis. If you can't find it, the rest of the document is built on sand, no matter how thick the deck.
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The second mechanism is concentration, where the kernel is the structure of a strategy. Concentration is the operating principle that makes the structure produce results. Now, this is a point I've written about in the past. Concentration, to me, I think is what makes a campaign often a very effective vehicle for driving change because campaigns almost by definition force a concentration, a cluster of activities in a specific, usually shortened window of time.
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Remalt's image for this concept is the lever. Strategy multiplies effectiveness the way a lever multiplies force. The trick is finding the sweet spot where small movement produces large effect. He calls those spots pivot points.
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strategic leverage in his account is anticipation plus insight into what's pivotal, plus the concentration of effort onto the pivot. Now it's that language strategic leverage, I think is something that often gets overused. I'm certainly guilty of overusing it, but I think it's, it's worth taking a step back and actually reminding ourselves what that word means strategic leverage. Uh,
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And maybe you don't want to use it in your own written documents because it's been overused and it's a bit buzzy. It's a buzzy lingo. But that visual, I think, is something that we want to think about when we are designing our strategy. Because the mechanism that makes concentration produce results.
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is what Ruhmelt calls the threshold effect. And the idea is simple. There's a level of effort below which you get no results at all. None. Cross the threshold and the response begins. And cross it well and the response amplifies. That's your strategic leverage. And he uses advertising as the worked example. A very small amount of advertising will produce no result at all. One has to get over this hump or threshold to start getting a response to advertising efforts.
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The brain ignores signals below a salience threshold. Below the threshold, more spend just produces more nothing. To get a response, you have to cross the line. And that means concentrating the spend in time or space rather than spreading it evenly. And that's why companies pulse advertising in heavy bursts rather than running it constantly. And that's why a new product launch rolls out region by region, often instead of nationally, because it concentrates the spend in the launch market.
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And does so until adoption crosses a tipping point. And then you move on to the next. And that is a theme consistent with what we talked about in the episode on change, on how change works by Damon Santola. So I do encourage you, if you want to explore more on this concept, go back to the feed and pull up that episode. That same mechanism, though, shows up everywhere in our work. Three or four authentic phone calls.
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to a constituency office in a single morning is a five alarm fire for the staff who answers the phone. It's a level of constituent interest that they almost never see and it gets escalated upward fast. And if you spread that same volume across three weeks, it produces nothing at all. Same number of contacts, different result. The threshold is about presence in a window, not cumulative volume.
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Concentration also works on the people watching from the sidelines. Ruhmelt makes the point in a school district concept. It may, for example, have more impact to completely turn around two schools than to make a 2% improvement in 200 schools.
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The math behind that observation is interesting, right? A 2% improvement across 200 schools, if you do the math on that, moves more children than a complete turnaround of one or two schools. So why is the second more impactful? Because the perceived efficacy of action, the visible difference in one place is what generates support for the next round of action.
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A small, visible wind pulls energy. A widely distributed marginal improvement sits inside the noise. Nobody notices it. Nobody talks about it. The political case for continuing the work doesn't get made.
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Rue Melt tells one more story I want to land here because it makes the same point in a different shape. A general manager named Marco Tonelli runs a machine company outside Milan. Italian heavy industry struggling to compete. And Tonelli doesn't try to fix everything at once. He runs three campaigns, one after another, 12 months on quality alone, telling everyone in the company that for the next year, every decision we make is about making our machines the most reliable and the fastest in the industry.
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Then 12 months on sales. Then market results begin to land. Each campaign builds on the one before. And if he had tried to run all three at once, he'd likely have produced none of them. The translation to public affairs work is direct. Most government relations functions are
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sometimes in a good faith effort may get tripped up trying to work every file at once, spreading effort evenly across everything that may be on the agenda. And the result is exactly what Brumelt's threshold model predicts, no signal on any of them. Concentration means picking one or two files where focused effort can actually move the regulator and being willing to lose ground on the others while you do it.
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The losing ground part is the political cost. It's why most teams don't concentrate. It's also why most teams don't move regulators. It's that constant pressure to feel a need to have consensus to drive action.
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The third mechanism is the proximate objective. I really like this one because I think it's one that we can often lose sight of in our line of work. Brumelt's claim is that one of the leader's most powerful tools is the creation of a feasible target, close enough at hand to be a hit. Not a goal, not a vision, a specific, dated, hittable target. The example he uses surprised me on first read. It's Kennedy's 1961 speech announcing the Apollo program.
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Most people remember that speech as the canonical example of inspirational vision. Kennedy at the lectern telling the country to dream bigger. Ruhmelt's reading is the opposite. The moon mission, he argues, was a carefully chosen, very deliberately constructed, proximate strategic objective. Feasible, near enough at hand to be solved, and chosen because it could be hit.
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Kennedy spoke as a decision maker talking to adults, not as a preacher addressing children. The diagnosis Kennedy made in his speech was about world opinion. The Soviet Union was using its space program to project leadership in front of a global audience. The US had vastly greater technological resources to draw on. The strategic question was how to allocate them.
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The objective was chosen because it was feasible. The engineering existed. Booster rockets, liquid and solid fuel, landing vehicles, most of the technology came from the existing ballistic missile program. Kennedy didn't pick win the space race forever. He picked land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A specific target with a date. Compare that to...
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win the war on drugs, or achieve energy independence, or closer to home for many of us, transform our public affairs function. Each of these sounds ambitious. Each gets set by leaders who want to be associated with ambition. None, though, tells you what to do on Monday or how you'd know whether you were closer to the goal at the end of the quarter than you were at the start. Counterintuitive piece in this chapter, the
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The piece that surprised me on first reading is that Rommelt argues for shorter planning horizons in dynamic environments, not longer ones.
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The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be. This runs against most planning advice. The default move when uncertainty rises is to plan further out. Do a longer horizon scenario exercise. Set bigger goals. Think strategically. Think strategically.
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Rommel's view is that doing this in a dynamic environment is exactly wrong. The more uncertain the world, the worse your forecast will be, and the more important it is to take strong positions and create options rather than committing to a destination. The metaphor he uses is from a Cold War strategist named Herbert Goldhammer writing about chess. He says...
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One does not win a chess game by always selecting moves that are directly aimed at trying to mate the opponent or even trying to win a particular piece. For most of the game, the master is making moves whose only purpose is to improve position, increase mobility for their own pieces, constrain the opponent's options, build toward enduring strength. When sufficient positional advantage has accumulated, the tactical moves that win the game become possible.
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but not before then. The translation here is the one I find myself making often in my own work. Most legislative campaigns set objectives that are too distant to be tested. Pass the bill, get the regulation change, move the file forward. A campaign can run for two years against an objective like pass the bill and never know whether it's making progress.
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The discipline of the proximate objective is to set targets close enough that you'll know inside a quarter whether you've hit them.
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Get the deputy minister to publicly commit to a consultation by the end of Q2. Get three of the five committee members on the record before recess. Get the issue named in the speech from the throne. Each of those is a position. Each one creates options for the next one. Each one is hittable or visibly missed in time to course correct.
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The bill passes or doesn't because of the position the campaign is in by the time the vote arrives. The proximate objectives are how you build the position. I love this concept so much. I wish I had access to this much earlier in my career.
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I've been thinking about the stuff I've written even in the last two or three years. And I have been guilty as charged of failing to think about what that proximate objective is. So this to me is a real gift. And if nothing else, it's the single biggest takeaway I most enjoy from the book.
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But let's move on to the fourth mechanism. This one doesn't have a single name in the book. Ruhmelt does come back to it case after case without ever giving it a label. But for the purposes of this episode, I'm gonna call it the asymmetry move because that's how I think about it when I'm using it in my client work. And that term just has been in the news a lot recently. So it's just where my brain has gone to. But the clearest articulation comes from Ruhmelt's account of a 1976 memo by an American defense strategist named Annie Marshall.
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written with his then deputy James Roche. Marshall ran an institution called the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment for nearly 40 years, and his role was thinking about strategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and later between the US and China. The standard analytical move in defense at the time was to inventory US and Soviet strengths and weaknesses, and then invest where the balance needed tipping.
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If the Soviets had more tanks, build more tanks. If they had more aircraft, build more aircraft. Marshall and Roche's 1976 memo argued for something different, though. A nation seeks opportunities to use one or more distinctive competences in such a way as to develop competitive advantage both in specific areas and overall.
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The reframe is simple to state, and it's a bit hard to internalize. The standard view sees competition as a strength contest, outspend, outbuild, outmatch. Marshall and Roche's view was that the strategic question is which dimension of competition to fight on in the first place.
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Pick the dimension where your relative strength imposes disproportionate cost on the opposition. Avoid the dimension where their strength imposes those costs on you. The idea shows up across the case studies in the book.
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He opens with a story with Nelson at Trafalgar, who didn't try to win a broadside contest with a larger fleet. He broke the Franco-Spanish line into pieces where his more experienced captains could win the clothes in melee, fighting a coherence contest instead of a strength contest.
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He talks about Walmart, how they didn't try to win an urban density contest with Kmart. Walmart instead built its supply chain around rural markets where Kmart had no presence and rebuild the economics of discount retail in the process. He talks about Canon, how they didn't try to outdo Xerox in centralized high volume copiers. Canon rebuilt the category around small, reliable desktop machines where Xerox's service system advantage didn't translate.
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In each case, the move is the same shape. Don't fight on the dimensions your opponent is built to win. Find the dimension where the structure works against them and yours works for them. Concentrate effort there. Use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you.
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This is a move I think public affairs practitioners may be using too rarely. Industry association facing well-funded NGO opponents tend to compete on the dimensions the NGO has built capacity around. Our media, public mobilization, narrative simplicity.
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These are the dimensions where the NGO has structural advantages, smaller teams, fewer veto points, faster cycle times, simpler emotional resonance. The asymmetry move is to ask which dimensions of the policy fight have a cost structure that favors the industry side and an opposing cost structure for the NGO.
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Technical depth in regulatory submissions, where the NGO can't sustain the analytical work over multiple consultation cycles. Continuous quiet engagement with the public service, where institutional memory compounds for the industry side and volunteer turnover erodes for the NGO side. Coalition assembly with rural and small business voices, where the NGO's urban professional base struggles to mobilize.
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The work is harder up front. The cost asymmetry compounds. And this is the part most industry associations I'd say might miss. You don't have to be bigger than your opponent to win on a dimension. You have to choose a dimension where being whatever you are imposes the highest cost on whatever they are. That's the move.
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Okay, mental models. Mental models are the part of every episode where I try to leave you with the named structural features, things that exist in the world, whether you attend to them or not. The point here isn't to memorize these. The point is that once you have a name for something, you start seeing it in the places you didn't see it before. And I hope that's the value of a model because it's a lens. And for this book, I have four, one of which I've already named, but I'm gonna come back to because it does sit at the heart of the book.
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And that's the kernel itself. As I say, we've already walked through the three parts, diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions. But I wanna name it as a model because the kernel does something specific. It tells you the minimum viable shape
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of a strategy. Take any document calling itself a strategy and ask, where's the diagnosis? Where's the guiding policy? Where are the actions? If you can't find all three, you don't have a strategy, you have something else with the wrong label on it. Maybe you have a budget, maybe you have a vision statement, maybe you have a list of goals, maybe you have a wish list. That's the work the does as a lens, you stop arguing about whether a document is a good strategy, and you start asking
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Okay, the second model is the pivot point. Every situation has a small number of points where focused effort produces disproportionate effect. Most situations have one or two, and the strategist's first analytical job is to find them. What makes this lens useful is that the pivot points aren't always where the energy in the room is being spent, and often they aren't.
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Most stakeholders pull effort toward the issues they personally care about, which aren't necessarily the issues that determine whether the file moves. Pivot point sits wherever the underlying mechanics make the work multiplicative, whether anyone in the room is currently looking at it or not.
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You can read an organization by looking at where its effort goes. Spread evenly across every issue on the agenda, strategy is being done poorly. Concentrated on a small number of points, the rest of the organization might not even consider strategic. That might be a sign that strategy is being done very well. The pattern is visible from outside if you know what to look for. So pivot points, hugely important. The third model.
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It's not in Ruhmelt's book. It's an observation I've taken from his framework and applied to work in our field. In any sustained contest, regulatory, political, public opinion, the actors involved are running on different time horizons. The side with the longer clock has a structural advantage that's almost invisible during any single round of fighting and almost decisive across the full contest.
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The clearest example I've watched up close to the Canadian energy sector over the last two decades. Industry came into each individual fight, pipelines, environmental assessments, royalty regimes running on quarterly clocks, boards turning over every few years, executives rotating through, budget cycles ending. Each campaign had a maximum sustainable duration and the duration was always shorter than the fight required.
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their environmental opponents were running on a different clock, entirely generational. The cause outlived or outlives the individual campaign, the individual organization, sometimes the individual leader. The activist side, it didn't need to win each round. It only needed to survive it. Survival across enough rounds eventually produced the win because the industry side ran out of attention before the activist side ran out of stomach. Okay.
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The same shape shows up in great power contests. The U.S. tends to lose long wars, not because it's defeated tactically, but because public attention has a half-life that the opposing side's tolerance for casualties does not. And for the opponent, outlasting is winning. What that lens lets you see is the dimension of competition that's happening.
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that conventional strategic analysis tends to miss. Most analysis catalogs capability. Who has more money, more access, more public support, more legal resources? The long clock asks a different question. Who can sustain pressure across more cycles? Whose institutional structure compounds attention and whose dissipates it? Win that comparison and you can lose every individual round and still win the contest. Lose it and the opposite is true.
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The fourth model is Ruhmelt's own term. And it's the one I think about often these days when I'm doing client work. And that is the dog's dinner. A dog's dinner is what you call a failed strategy artifact.
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Ramelt's example is a strategic plan from a small Pacific Northwest city. 47 strategies in that plan, 178 action items. And let's sit with this action item number 122 on that list was create a strategic plan.
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A school district plan he cites has seven strategies, 26 tactics, and 234 action steps. A corporate vision statement everyone in the room can sign because it commits to nothing. The dog's dinner is the political organizational artifact that gets produced when the work of choice has been avoided.
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Once you can name it, you can refuse to mistake it for strategy. You can also recognize you're producing one. The early warning signs are easy to read. The document keeps growing. Every stakeholder gets a paragraph. The language softens in each round of edits. Nobody objects to the final version. That last one is the giveaway. Universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice. Okay.
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RoomElts Online and the tests I use now whenever I'm watching a document come together. If nobody in the room has to be told their priority isn't going to be in this round, you don't have a strategy. You have a list.
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Okay, let's move on to misunderstandings. These are the ways I've seen this book potentially misread, how it could be misread, both by other practitioners or even myself, first time I spent time with it. None of these are critiques of Ruhmelt. These are purely misreadings of what he's actually arguing. The first is that strategy means having a clear vision.
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Someone reads the book, walks away convinced that the takeaway is that organizations need a clearer sense of direction, a sharper vision statement, a more compelling articulation of purpose, a more confident answer to where we are going. Ruhmelt is arguing the opposite. He spans real pages of this book on the differences between a vision and a strategy. And his point is that the two get routinely confused to the detriment of the second approach.
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Wells Fargo's corporate vision is the cleanest example. We worked through it earlier. The company wants to satisfy all its customers' financial needs, help them succeed, be the premium provider in every market, be known as a great company. There's no information in any of that about how.
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A vision is an ambition. A strategy is a designed response to a specific challenge. Mistaking the first for the second is what produces the documents the book exists to refute. If your reading of Rommelt makes you want to write a sharper vision statement, you've taken the wrong lesson. He'd want you to write a sharper diagnosis.
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Okay, misunderstanding number two is that the kernel is just one more framework. This second misread is it would be from readers who already know strategy literature. They file the kernel next to the SWOT analysis, next to Porter's Five Forces, next to the BCG matrix. One more analytical framework among many.
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Pick it up when you need it, put it down when you don't. That misses what Rumelt is actually claiming. His argument isn't analytical. It's very structural. The kernel isn't a tool you bring out at a certain moment. It's the minimum shape of any strategy worthy of the name. SWAT, Five Forces, BCG matrix, those can sit inside the diagnosis step or feed the guiding policy. They don't replace the kernel.
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their inputs into it and a document that has a beautiful SWOT analysis and a list of actions, but no coherent diagnosis or guiding policy is missing the strategy, regardless of how good the SWOT was. This misreading matters because it lets practitioners feel like they've engaged with Ruhmelt while continuing to skip the diagnosis step. They may use his vocabulary, but they don't necessarily change their work.
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Okay, misunderstanding number three is the one I find myself making repeatedly even after several reads of this book. So I do come back to this book for this reason. And that is that more uncertainty calls for a longer horizon planning. Rumelt argues, and I'm restating the line we hit earlier, that the more dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be.
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shorter horizons under more uncertainty, not longer ones. That argument is so counterintuitive, it slides off the brain on first reading. The intuition that uncertainty calls for thinking further out is deeply trained into how we operate. Boards demand five-year plans precisely when the next five years are most opaque.
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Ruhmelt's claim is the opposite. The more uncertain the world, the worse your forecast will be, and the more important it is to take strong positions and to create options. Long horizon planning under high uncertainty isn't discipline. It's wishful thinking dressed as discipline. The chess master playing the middle game doesn't plan 20 moves ahead. They take a position that's stronger than 10 moves later, regardless of which path the opponent chooses.
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That's the move. If your environment is dynamic and your planning horizon is getting longer, the structural argument suggests you've got the relationship backwards.
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Okay, misunderstanding number four is that bad strategy is a failure of effort. The instinct here is to assume that bad strategy is a mistake, something well-intentioned leaders fall into when they're rushed, when they're under-resourced or distracted. Fix the resourcing, fix the timing, give the team a better off-site and the strategy will improve.
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Ruhamel's diagnosis is harder than that. Bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or the difficulty of choice.
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If we read that one twice in our head, active avoidance. Bad strategy isn't what happens when leaders fail to do good strategy. It's what happens when they avoid it. Because doing it would mean inflicting pain, setting goals aside, disappointing stakeholders, refusing the comfort of the document everyone in the room can sign. Okay.
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That's a different problem than we didn't have time and it has a different fix. The fix isn't more time, more analysis or a better offsite. The fix is a leader willing to make choices that hurt. If your organization isn't producing good strategy, the question to ask isn't whether the team has the right tools. It's whether anyone in the room is willing to inflict the pain that strategy requires. That's an uncomfortable diagnosis. It implicates the leader, not the staff.
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Okay, let's move on to modern applications. This is where I take Ruhmelt's mechanisms. I try to translate them into the work that we actually do, how public affairs looks like today. Coalition campaigns, regulatory files, corporate engagements. He didn't write the book about our field, but the mechanisms operate in our field. And once you can see them, I think you can't stop seeing them.
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Okay, let's start with the dog's dinner. And I mentioned this earlier, I have myself produced the dog's dinner more than once in my career. And I'm ashamed to say probably more than once, even in the last 12 months. The pattern usually starts with a desire to demonstrate that the team has been thoughtful. We're presenting to a client, the file is complex. We want them to know we've done the work.
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So we hit them with appendices, stakeholder maps, decision trees, tables that cross reference jurisdictions and influence vectors and timing windows. The deck swells from 12 slides to 36. And by the time we're done, the document is a monument to how complicated the situation is.
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The client signs off, they thank us for the rigor, and we feel like we've delivered. Except we haven't. What we've delivered is a wall of complexity that proves the team has been busy and produces no decision the client can actually act on. The dog's dinner isn't only the artifact of coalition compromise, it's also the artifact
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of consultants. And I include myself here. It's what we produce when we want to be seen as thoughtful. The reflex to demonstrate effort by accumulating analytical objects is the same reflex that produces the small city plan with 47 strategies and 178 action items. The motive is different, but the output is the same. The coalition version is the more familiar shape in our field.
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Right. An industry association brings five or six member companies together to advance a shared file. Each company contributes its priorities. The deck grows. Every member gets a paragraph. The final document lists eight strategic objectives, 23 priority actions and a stakeholder map covering 40 entities. Everyone signs. The mechanism that produced it is the one remelt watched at DEC.
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Nobody was willing to refuse a member's passionately held priority, so nothing was set aside. So the document hurt no interest and crippled the coalition's ability to move the file.
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The fix in both cases is the kernel. Diagnose what's actually going on. Write a guiding policy that names what the work is concentrating on and what it isn't. Commit to coherent actions. Whether you're a consultant resisting the urge to demonstrate effort through volume or a coalition resisting the urge to keep every member's priority on page, the discipline is the same.
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Here's the move I think goes beyond what Remelt wrote about, and I think that matters for our environment specifically. We now live in a world where the audiences we're trying to influence, ministers, deputy ministers, regulators, board members, are drowning in information and short on time. Clarity is in genuinely short supply. Simplicity is the biggest gift we can give them.
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And articulating thinking with simplicity is harder than producing the wall of appendices, not easier. It requires the kernel done well enough that what comes out the other end is a one-page memo. The file, the diagnosis, the move, ready to go in a briefing book without being skimmed past. That's the practitioner's version of the kernel. I think...
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Everything else, if I'm honest with myself, has been and is decoration. The second translation comes out of the threshold mechanism, and this is all about pulsing. It's tempting, particularly as an organization grows, as a company becomes much larger.
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that the government relations or the public affairs functions end up working different aspects of every file, potentially with similar levels of intensity. And that creates the risk of spreading effort thin across the agenda. And Rameel's threshold model predicts what happens, and that is you get no signal on any of them. The discipline of pulsing is to pick words.
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One or two files where focused effort can actually cross the threshold and to be willing to lose ground on the rest while you do so. The same logic operates in mobilization work. A thousand templated emails on the same issue reads as manufactured and gets dismissed by the office that receives it.
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three or four authentic phone calls in the same morning is a five alarm fire that gets escalated to the minister. The first looks like more effort. The second is what crosses the threshold. The most common failure mode in our field isn't a lack of effort. It's effort spread thinly enough to produce nothing. Pulsing is the discipline of saying no to the files that aren't ready to move yet so that the files that are can be moved properly.
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Okay, let's move on to proximate objectives in the legislative cycle. The third translation is the one I find hardest to get clients to adopt because it sounds like under ambition. Most public affairs strategies set blue sky objectives. Pass the bill, change the regulation, position our industry as a partner.
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These targets are too distant to be tested. A campaign can run for two years against an objective like pass the bill and never know whether it's making progress. The discipline of the proximate objective is to set targets close enough that you'll know inside a quarter whether you hit them.
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Get the deputy minister to public commit to consultation before recess. Get the issue named in the next mandate letter. Get three of the five committee members on the record by second reading. Each one is a position. Each one creates options for the next move. Each one is hittable or visibly missed in time to course correct.
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The chess analogy from Ruhmelt's chapter is the right one here. Most legislative campaigns are won by accumulated positional advantage, not by a single tactical move. The proximate objectives are the positional moves. The bill passes or doesn't because the position the campaign is in by the time the vote arrives.
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Okay, let's talk about the asymmetry move under the long clock. So the fourth translation combines the asymmetry mechanism with the long clock model.
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Once you understand the long clock, the asymmetry question for a practitioner working on the industry side of a regulatory or political fight file changes shape. The naive version of the asymmetry, find the dimension where industry has more resources, runs into the long clock problem. Resources don't compound the way attention does. Activists who outlast industry can defeat industry's resources by simply staying in the fight long enough.
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out resourcing them isn't enough. The sharper version of the asymmetry move under these conditions is to look for windows where industry's structural strengths strengths produce durable outcomes, outcomes that survive industry's eventual attention lost, a regulatory framework that takes effect after a multi-year approval process,
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A long-term contract with structural protections, an infrastructure approval that reshapes the physical landscape and is hard to reverse. In each case, the move isn't to win the public attention contest. It's to use the window of concentrated industry attention to produce facts on the ground that don't require ongoing industry attention to persist.
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The activist side often wins by preventing exactly those durability moves, keeping permits and litigation, keeping regulatory frameworks in flux, keeping the question open longer than industry can sustain interest. So the strategic question for industry isn't whether to fight the long clock. It's how to use the short window of concentrated attention to produce outcomes the long clock can't easily reverse.
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Marshall and Roach's framework applies here in a more specific form than the original. Don't try to win on the dimension where the contest is currently being fought. Ask which dimension produces irreversible outcomes within the window your structural advantages can sustain. That's almost always a different dimension. The strategic work, it's hard work without a doubt, is finding it.
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Okay, let's move on to the mastery lesson. I wanna close on what excellent practice looks like for someone who has internalized this book. It looks like the practitioner who keeps doing structural work when everyone else has moved on to action. The political environment we operate in pulls in the opposite direction and the pull is constant.
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Clients want recommendations, boards want plans, coalitions want decks. The pressure to move from analysis to action is reasonable. Clients and stakeholders aren't paying for a year of contemplation, but the mastery posture is the willingness to slow down and sit inside that pressure and to keep...
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returning to the structural questions, even when the room is impatient for output. What's actually going on here? Where's the hidden power? Where's the pivot? Each of those questions is uncomfortable to dwell on. Diagnosing means committing to a judgment under uncertainty, knowing you may be wrong. Reframing the contest means going against the framing. The room may have organized itself around. And most organizations resist that because the existing framing is where their identity sits.
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Concentrating means disappointing stakeholders by working on fewer things more deeply when the political costs of doing so are immediate and the strategic costs of not doing so are diffuse and delayed. The harder...
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version of the lesson. The one Ruhmelt keeps returning to is about what the leader's job actually is. Most leaders handed a complex situation, named a vision and passed the complexity downstream. The team receives an impossible problem dressed as a clear direction. The strategy never gets written because the problem was never made tractable. The mastery move is the inverse. Sit with the mess.
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Diagnose what's actually happening. Find the dimension where your structural strengths compound and your opponents work against them. Concentrate force onto the pivot. Then hand the team a smaller, sharper problem with a feasible objective and a coherent set of actions attached. That's what it means to lead a strategy. There's a connection here to Cialdini, the Cialdini episode that I think is worth naming briefly. Cialdini's posture, you recall, was...
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that the practitioner who thinks they've outsmarted the machinery is the easiest mark in the room. The defensive thinker who knows the triggers and respects them is the one less likely to be played. Ruhamel's posture is of a similar shape.
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The strategist who thinks they have it all figured out, the perfect framework, the right answer, the full picture, has stopped doing strategy. The strategist who keeps treating their own diagnosis as a hypothesis open to revision is the one whose strategies will hold up. That's the line Ruhmelt takes deliberately. A strategy in his framing is a hypothesis, an educated bet about how the world works.
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The mastery posture here is to commit hard enough to the bet, to act out on it, while staying honest about it being a bet, to revise when the evidence demands. The most reliable signal that someone has internalized this book isn't that they have answers. It's that they're willing to say, I don't know what the diagnosis is. Let me sit with this longer, without flinching, in front of a client, in front of a stakeholder, in front of your boss, who would rather hear something definitive. That's the posture. I think everything else does flow from here.
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Thank you.
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I wanna come back to that municipal campaign in Toronto. Our candidate had broad appeal, conservatives, liberals, even progressive left could find things in this candidate's platform that they could support. And inside the campaign, we treated this as a strategic asset. We built our message to hold all of those constituencies together at once. We tested every line, we threaded the needle every time we opened our mouths. The candidate looked like the most reasonable person in the race and we lost. And I sat with that for a while. The lesson I took from it wasn't tactical.
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Broad appeal had been a feature of the candidate's personality and we mistook it for strategy. Our opponent had done the structural work we hadn't. They diagnosed what the race was actually about. They found the dimension where the contest was being decided. They concentrated their candidate's voice onto that single dimension and accepted that voters who didn't agree with them weren't going to vote for them anyway. We'd done none of that work.
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We had a coalition. We had a message discipline within the coalition. We had a candidate who could hold a room. None of that is strategy. Strategy is the structural work of diagnosing what's critical, finding the hidden power in the situation, and concentrating force onto the pivot. The result wasn't surprising once I understood what had actually happened. The version of this you'll encounter most often in our field isn't a campaign loss.
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It's a coalition assembling around a file. It's a board setting priorities for the year. It's a client asking for an alignment session. Each one drifts by default toward the same failure mode our campaign drifted into. Each one produces by default a document that holds everyone's interest at once and concentrates for the year.
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force on nothing. The discipline that prevents it is the discipline of doing the structural work, diagnosing what's actually happening instead of what the room wants to hear, finding the dimension of the contest that matters instead of the dimension everyone else is already fighting on, concentrating force onto the pivot instead of spreading it thin across the agenda.
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The work is harder than it looks. The reason most organizations don't have a strategy isn't that the work is unfamiliar. It's that the work is uncomfortable and the political incentives reward avoiding it.
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trying to be all things, all people is a failing strategy. It's what gets produced when no one in the room has done the structural work. And that's where I'll leave it. If you are finding this episode helpful, if you're finding this series interesting, please, I'd love for you to do one of two things.
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Either give this a five-star rating wherever you get your podcast. It's going to help with the algorithm. It's going to help with the discovery or share this with one colleague, one friend, one family member that you think might benefit from this. And with that, I'll talk to you soon.