A good strategy recognizes the nature of the challenge and offers a way of surmounting it. Simply being ambitious is not a strategy.

It contended, “All too much of what is put forward as strategy is not. The basic problem is confusion between strategy and strategic goals.

Unless leadership offers a theory of why things haven’t worked in the past, or why the challenge is difficult, it is hard to generate good strategy.

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

Good strategy work is necessarily empirical and pragmatic.