(Rumelt, ‘Good Strategy / Bad Strategy’, p.20)

Andy Marshall and I were both interested in how the process of planning shapes strategic outcomes.

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.

Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance.

Good strategy is design, and design is about fitting various pieces together so they work as a coherent whole.