Working hard is not a strategy

In the business world, the word strategy is often thrown around together with words such as ambition, leadership, and determination.

While all these things are clearly important if you want to be successful, they can’t be used to define a company’s strategy.

Many organizations […] have multiple goals and initiatives that symbolize progress, but no coherent approach to accomplishing that progress other than “spend more and try harder”. — Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Richard Rumelt explains the difference between bad strategy and good strategy in his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy - The difference and why it matters, and how bad strategy is not simply the absence of good strategy.

Good strategy needs three main elements (what Richard calls the Kernel):

• A diagnosis, to define and explain the nature of the challenge you want to face
• A guiding policy, to define the high level approach to deal with the obstacles identified in the diagnosis
• A set of actions, coordinated with one another to accomplish what’s specified by the guiding policy