Goals for Strategy
Sometimes we mistake goals for strategy. Three ideas from Richard Rumelt1 about this:
“If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.”
“Use the word goals to express overall values and desires, and use the word objective to denote specific operational targets. It is strategy that transforms goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives.”
“Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.”
cfr Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. ↩︎