For leadership, read "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy".

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11721966-good-strategy-b...

Lost and Founder: The Mostly Awful, Sometimes Awesome Truth about Building a Tech Startup
by Rand Fishkin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957156

Transforming NOKIA: The Power of Paranoid Optimism to Lead Through Colossal Change
by Risto Siilasmaa
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39850907

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
by Matthew Walker
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
by David Kushner
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222146

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
by Daniel Coyle
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25870385

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34964879

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters
by Richard P. Rumelt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36658033

Just finished reading Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Very good book.

This piece of advice is good, but I don't see it applied. If you take the book's advice as useful (and I do), good strategy starts with diagnosis of a problem. The problem statements are much more important than the solution statements.

Out of the myriad shifts and adjustments that occur each year, some are clues to the presence of a substantial wave of change and, once assembled into a pattern, point to the fundamental forces at work. The evidence lies in plain sight, waiting for you to read its deeper meanings.

One problem that Rumelt raises is that of information. How do you come to know enough that you can reach a diagnosis?

If deciding on a strategy is the problem to be solved, then gathering the right information is the problem before the problem to be solved.

Secondly, if many people are familiar with these ideas, and their organizations are still not able to decide on an effective strategy, then there is a deeper and more interesting problem: how do you build groups of people that are able to reach good decisions together?

And it's not enough to simply encourage argument, as Dalio would suggest: https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy

Good books on the topic:

- Blue Ocean strategy: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23627395-blue-ocean-stra...

- Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11721966-good-strategy-b...

I would say, that for good strategy you need:

[1] Understand what is happening in the market, why competitors are doing well / not doing well.

[2] Guiding policy. How to address company's issues from 1. or how to differentiate from the competition.

[3] A set of coherent actions to implement [2].

Hypothesis about future are important, but it is only a small part of the strategic thinking.

Michael Porter has been cautioning about mistaking a business model for a strategy for nearly 40 years, his ideas are taught in every business school, and the lesson still needs to be relearnt by every fresh set of senior managers.

A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the “kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a strategy.

1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity.

2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond.

3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the strategy.

I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.

I highly recommend it. It's clear, intelligent, properly defines what strategy is (which most other books fail to do) and isn't, and how to go about designing and implementing it. It's very low on bullshit and very high on examples and insights from both history and business.

According to "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" (great book) this was the result of a paper written in the 1970s where this strategy was conceived, which was then adopted by the US military as its main strategy against the Soviet.

A strategy is a set of actions designed to achieve a particular objective.

The actions need to be credible, coherent, and focused.

Designing them properly takes hard work.

The most practical path to actually being strategic:

1. "Wild Success":
Create alignment around what it looks like

2. "Problems / Whose":
Deeply grok problem space and its ecosys, and be crystal clear abt what problems looking to solve, and for whom.

3. Prioritize:
Focus means saying "no". Cut, ruthlessly, anything inessential.

Working on applying these ideas outside work context, too.