Kernel and Cascade: Using ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ and ‘Playing to Win’.

A comparison of ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ by Richard Rumelt and ‘Playing to Win’ by Roger Martin and AJ Lafley.

Richard Rumelt has a kernel, and Roger Martin a cascade. Their two works have much in common: both describe strategy as a creative act, emphasise the necessity of choice and insist on aligning action with decision.   The pair also see good strategy as vanishingly rare…

These are two of the finest books written on strategy, and complement each other well, though I use them differently. For me, Richard Rumelt wrote the definitive text on what strategy is, what it is not and why it is absent: it is a rich source of wisdom and inspiration. Roger Martin wrote an eminently usable playbook for creating an effective strategy. 

Not everyone will agree with this distinction, but in this short comparison (which is most suitable for readers acquainted with both works), I will describe the logic behind it.

Roger Martin has written a comparison between the two, which I have quoted freely from, and I would have done the same for ‘Good Strategy Bad Strategy’ if there was an article to quote from.

Diagnosis and Strategic Analysis

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ and ‘Playing to Win’ are both excellent and similar in approach here. Still, Martin creates a well-defined and actionable starting point of the Winning Aspiration that is hard to beat, which is so much better than the unholy trinity of ‘mission, vision, values’ that beleaguers so many organisations.

Martin on diagnosis: “Rumelt argues for a lot of work on the diagnosis of the challenge — really understanding why the challenge exists in order to determine what coherent set of actions could overcome the challenge. That very much resonates with me. I have always liked the John Dewey admonition that “a problem well put is half solved”…

Guiding Policy and Strategic Choices 

Guiding policy is where ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ as a playbook breaks for me. The term sounds intangible, and I could never quite translate it into concrete steps. My research shows that others appear to have had similar challenges.

Martin on Guiding Policy: “I am a little less sanguine about guiding policies. I would roughly translate it into what I think of as the theory of competitive advantage — the way we have chosen to win in the place we have chosen to play…I always try to go the extra mile on making any advice that I give as actionable as I can. That is why I break the theory of advantage first into two boxes — Where-to-Play and How-to-Win — and then further segment the choice categories into Must-Have Capabilities and Enabling Management Systems.”

Coherent Actions and Integrated Choices

Martin is precise about the integration necessary for Coherence – it is essentially built into the guiding logic of the cascade. Rumelt is very clear on what is needed but perhaps less helpful in getting us there.

Martin on Coherence: “Coherence appears equally important to both of us. To Rumelt, a strategy that lacks Coherence is automatically in his ‘bad strategy’ category. For me, strategy is an integrated set of choices — that isn’t integrated if it isn’t coherent. Again, we are compatible. However, I am not a fan of the use of ‘coherent.’ I always have a rule that if you want to further explain a particular thing, you must not use the same descriptor in the explanation as in the thing itself…So, if strategy is supposed to be ‘coherent,’ it isn’t helpful to say that the actions flowing out of it need to be ‘coherent.’”

Adaptability and Iterative Refinement

Though the terminology is slightly different, both consider strategy to be iterative, requiring continuous feedback, adaptation and refinement. In action, doing it is easier in Play to Win: it is simple enough to add loops between each stage of the choice cascade, though the looping is not limited to adjacent steps.  

Avoiding Bad Strategy and Where Not to Play

The idea of ‘where not to play’ is compelling. Keeping Salespeople out of bad customer engagements and use cases that will consume resources without ever delivering customer satisfaction can make the difference between a good result and a bad one.  

Rumelt, though, provides unambiguous guidance on how to detect and avoid the bad strategy that will take you to those places: “Bad strategy is not simply the absence of good strategy. It grows out of specific misconceptions and leadership dysfunctions. Once you develop the ability to detect bad strategy, you will dramatically improve your effectiveness at judging, influencing, and creating strategy. To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks: 

• Fluff. Fluff is a form of gibberish masquerading as strategic concepts or arguments. It uses “Sunday” words (words that are inflated and unnecessarily abstruse) and apparently esoteric concepts to create the illusion of high-level thinking. 
• Failure to face the challenge. Bad strategy fails to recognise or define the challenge. When you cannot define the challenge, you cannot evaluate a strategy or improve it. 
• Mistaking goals for strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. 
• Bad strategic objectives. A strategic objective is set by a leader as a means to an end. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address critical issues or when they are impracticable.” 

Most of us who have worked in B2B technology companies have plenty of experience of these failures – I know I have. I recall a CEO who proclaimed that the company’s strategy was ‘to become a billion dollar company’, a Sales Kickoff themed ‘The Big Bets’ where nothing we did was excluded, and a CRO who insisted on a strategy slide for every initiative—but it was just a tick box: almost anything passed as long as it had the right heading! Rumelt’s ruthless dissection of leadership’s most common strategic failures was like therapy for me the first time I read it: finally, here was someone who really knew better!

Conclusion

I am of the opinion that ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ and ‘Playing to Win’ are the two finest textbooks I have read on strategy. Both have exerted a great influence on the Guiding Principles of B2B Navigator.com. If it sounds like I favour “Playing to Win over “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”, I do- but as an actionable playbook, as described in the article on The Brilliant Basics. Rumelt’s book is a rich source of inspiration and wisdom that I value greatly. I am grateful for them both.

Afterword – Other Influential Strategy Books

For context, the other strategy books that have had the most influence on our work are:

• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne – most notably for competitive analysis using Value Curves.
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore. Documentum’s domination of the Pharmaceutical patent approval process was used as an example of a Beachhead Market Segment. This had special significance to me as I worked for the Documentum group in EMC Software in the early/mid 2000s.
• Competitive Advantage by Michael Porter. I used value chains to map out what the Chairman described as ‘The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Genome’ for key verticals at OpenText.
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen
• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. At the time this was published we were much taken by the idea of the BHAG concept, which was adopted by the CEO we were working for in the mid-late’90s.
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. The same CEO was extremely enthusiastic about getting the right people on the bus, though in practice relationships dominated the seating policy.
• HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy by Harvard Business Review