ICHEC – Professor Luc Moeremans
2015/2016

Catarina Duarte 153111

Corporate Strategy
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
The difference and why it matters by Richard Rumelt

Part I
The book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy written by the professor of business and society in the school of business and management UCLA - Richard Rumelt - clarifies the difference between good strategies and bad strategies and provides a thorough understanding of how to create and think about good strategies. It daylights a fundamental range of aspects to which has not been given much importance and where people fail when trying to manage an organization, a school or even a research. Presenting interesting and fascinating examples of contemporary businesses and from world’s history, Richard Rumelt motivates his ideas and makes the readers have a clear understanding of them.
The difference between a good strategy and what people think of a “good strategy” has grown over the years.
In the opinion of Richard Rumelt a strategy is not a goal or a vision but a plan to achieve that ambition. It is fundamental to find and understand what problems an organization is facing and design a way to coordinate actions and resources in order to deal with those problems. The problem is when leaders cannot define those obstacles, making impossible to create a strategy to overcome the organization’s challenges; or when leaders mistake the plan to deal with the organization’s problems with statements of desire, using buzz-words which create the illusion that the organization is in the right way to be successful.
One example stated in the book illustrating this idea is the invasion and conquest of Iraq by the U.S. military forces in 2003. The invasion was quick and once the war between the armies end, the administration leaders hoped that a democratic civil society would be quickly