Hey, Luca & Nicola here — welcome to a new edition of The Hybrid Hacker! Together we write original articles about engineering management, career growth, and productivity, to more than 160K friends! To read all the editions and join the private community, subscribe to the paid version: Hey there! Today I am re-publishing our take on one of the best books we have ever read in our Community Book Club, which is Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt. I am doing so because 1) this is a timeless book, which can help people from any kind of job, and 2) because the first edition of our review came out before I started working on Hybrid Hacker, so readers here have likely missed it! This article should work on two levels:
Let’s go! ⚖️ Good and BadAt the very beginning of the book, Richard Rumelt says that strategy seems to be everywhere these days. It was 2011 when he wrote this, and, I swear, it is even more true today. Every day we are bombarded with threads, LinkedIn posts, presentations, and ebooks by people who seem to have strategies about pretty much anything. But then, Rumelt argues, truly good strategy is rare. This is a core theme of the book, which, as the name implies, spends almost the same time talking about good strategy, as it does talking about bad strategy. And that’s what caught my attention — as a fellow writer. Whenever I read something, I can’t help but think about how I would have written about that topic, in terms of structure, tone of voice, and actual content. It’s like a process that runs all the time in the back of my mind. So, what struck me is that this book is not called “How to create a good strategy” — or some catchy variation on that. It is called Good Strategy / Bad Strategy.
In fact, the book hits you with a one-two punch:
This is so effective that we will follow the same pattern for this review. Here is what we will cover:
Let’s dive in! ❌ Bad StrategyEarly in the book, Rumelt says that good strategy is about two things:
This is straightforward. If you asked any leader for a definition of strategy, most would probably come up with something similar. The problem, though, is that doing these two steps is hard. So, people take shortcuts and often call strategy what strategy is not. Bad strategy has four characteristics:
Why does this happen? Reasons are many—as Rumelt explains—but personally I like to focus on one, which is commitment. I am an amateur chess player and in chess there is this notion of committal and non-commital moves.
Non-committal moves keep you in the game, but committal moves are how you win. You can draw parallels to this with almost any domain. Retaining optionality is important as long as you are not sure about what your strengths are, or how to leverage them. But then, success comes down to finding a way to narrow your options and make some irreversible bet on what makes you special. And that’s where many companies get lost. Leaders don’t want to choose among the various interests within their operations, each backed by stakeholders with legitimate theses, and end up with an unfocused strategy. To compensate for this, you may witness two different types of drifts, based on your company culture:
But both styles are not a substitute for good strategy. You can’t brute-force your way to success in the first case, just like you can’t expect your unique strategy to come out of fill-in-the-blanks templates in the second. 💡 Examples and connecting the dots...Subscribe to Hybrid Hacker to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Hybrid Hacker to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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Good Strategy / Bad Strategy 📗
Thursday, 25 September 2025
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