Business strategist and author Richard Rumelt explains why he recommends reading historical biographies rather than standard strategy textbooks.
Insight
Simultaneously pursuing high growth and higher profit margins is inherently contradictory
“Growth and profit are, they battle each other. Let's say we define profit as return on equity. Well, if you're going to increase growth and increase return on equity, how do you do that? Because you're basically going to invest less to get your return on equit…”
Insight
Abstract performance goals, profit targets, and wish lists are not strategy
“Bad strategy the standard bad strategy for a corporation is a set of profit goals or performance goals. A set of goals. Now goals are the engineering of how companies work to some extent, but abstract high level goals, they're not a strategy. They're something…”
Insight
Breakthroughs like ChatGPT only offer a temporary one-to-two-year talent hiring advantage
“Yeah, so if you're, if you've invented ChatGBT, you can bring in the smartest AI people for a year or two. Because, you know, everybody wants, oh, oh, the smart AI people want to work at the cutting edge with the current winner. Then they'll start arguing with…”
Insight
Senior executives do not need external consulting firms to formulate their strategy
“My experience working with companies is that the senior executives have to do this. And my experience is that the senior executives know pretty much everything you need to know to do this. That you don't need, you know, consulting firms to come in and analyze …”
Insight
Business analysis frameworks and two-by-two matrices are analytical tools, not strategy
“These are analytical tools for analyzing the problem, for thinking about things, for looking at competition, but they're not strategy.”
Insight
A real strategy requires problem diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action
“All three elements have to be there. You have to be an understanding of the situation. There has to be a guiding policy. How are we going to deal with it? And that can be a long-term sense of how we compete. I mean, you don't have to change your strategy every…”