Richard Rumelt - Work Quotes

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Changes don't come along in nice annual packages, so the need for strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.

Richard Rumelt
Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

Richard Rumelt
When organizations are unable to make new strategies — when people evade the work of choosing among different paths in the future — then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership's insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices.

Richard Rumelt
Prior work has shown an association between diversification strategy and profitability. This paper replicates that association using more recent and complete data and goes on to investigate the sources of the association. Theoretical arguments are advanced which predict the association which will remain once the effects of varying industry profitability are removed. Empirical tests verify this prediction and permit the discrimination between the effects of industry and diversification strategy on profitability.

Richard Rumelt
Some of the biggest changes have been in the process of generating business strategies—what I call strategy work. Around 1980, the received wisdom was to decentralize into business units, which would each generate a strategic plan. These plans were then amalgamated up the hierarchy, in some portfolio way, for senior management. That approach has all but disappeared, and we've seen a dramatic recentralization of strategy work.

Richard Rumelt