LLenny's Podcast
← All resources
book

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

By Richard Rumelt

5 recommend/use · 6 sourced episodes

Every sourced reference

Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.

Related frameworks

Strategy3 steps

$100 Voting for Prioritization

Give everyone $100 to allocate across options and surface the elephant in the room.

Read →
Productivity4 steps

Ambitious Retry (Pass@N) Tool Use

Get more from AI tools by asking for the ambitious change and fully restarting on failure instead of hammering the same attempt

Read →
Innovation4 steps

Build for the Exponential (Skate to Where the Puck Is Going)

Build products for the model that arrives in 6-12 months, betting that today's 20%-working features hit 100%

Read →
Leadership3 steps

Catalyst Review Forum

Replace the standing weekly review with parallel, role-based topic blocks anyone can join.

Read →
Leadership3 steps

Cathedrals Not Bricks

Make every team member see the whole cathedral, not just the brick they're laying.

Read →
Innovation5 steps

Constitutional AI Self-Critique Loop

Align a model to written principles by having it critique and rewrite its own outputs, then train on the fix

Read →
Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.

Read →
Communication3 steps

Flash Tags for Calibrated Feedback

Tag every piece of feedback FYI, Suggestion, Recommendation, or Plea so teams know how hard to weigh it.

Read →
Strategy3 steps

Focusing Power on an Addressable Target

Strategy works only when you concentrate a genuine source of power on a target that can actually be moved.

Read →
Innovation5 steps

Future-Backward Aspirational Strategy (Big-s)

Design-led, ~6-month process that imagines distinct 5–10 year futures and prototypes them as concept cars.

Read →
Productivity5 steps

Imperfect Metrics as Education

Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.

Read →
Innovation3 steps

Learn by Making, Test the Extremes

Stop debating consequential decisions — run the experiment that shows the upper and lower bounds now.

Read →
Mindset4 steps

Marginal-Impact Reasoning Under Tail Risk

Prioritize catastrophic low-probability risks by expected value and by how few people are already working on them

Read →
Communication3 steps

Newspaper Headline Winning Aspiration

Have the team write the future headline about your product, then blend the headlines into one aspiration.

Read →
Self-Mastery3 steps

Oh-Sht Moments Career Calibration

Measure growth by counting the moments you felt underqualified and stretched.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

Present-Forward Product Strategy Playbook (Small-s)

A repeatable five-phase, 8–12 week process to turn scattered inputs into three focused strategic pillars.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

Problem-to-Pillar Down-Select

Cluster raw problems, flip them into opportunities, then rank on four criteria to pick exactly three pillars.

Read →
Self-Mastery4 steps

Resting in Motion

Treat the busy, working state as your normal baseline so heavy long-term work stays sustainable

Read →
Strategy4 steps

Spotting Bad Strategy

Four tells that a 'strategy' is actually empty: no diagnosis, goals-as-strategy, fluff, and incoherent actions.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.

Read →
Productivity3 steps

Systems Not Goals

Build a default-on repeatable system instead of chasing a one-off target.

Read →
Productivity3 steps

The 10% Planning Rule

Never spend more than 10% of an execution period planning it.

Read →
Strategy4 steps

The Action Agenda (Ambition-Filter Method)

Stop writing a 'strategy.' Filter your ambitions down to one important, addressable challenge and act.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

The Boring Engineering Strategy

Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.

Read →
Innovation3 steps

The Crux: Insight Through Immersion

Find the single hardest solvable part of the problem, immerse in it, and let insight emerge.

Read →
Productivity4 steps

The DORA Four Keys

Measure software delivery with two speed and two stability metrics that move in tandem.

Read →
Strategy4 steps

The Economic Turing Test

Measure transformative AI by whether you'd hire an agent for a real job without knowing it's a machine

Read →
Leadership4 steps

The Foundry: Facilitating a Group to One Action Agenda

Put the leader plus 7-8 people in a room, surface 25 problems, then focus on the one or two addressable ones.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

The Four-Box Framework

Write your hypothesis in words before you touch data, so you can debug the idea and the measurement separately.

Read →
Leadership3 steps

The Fruit Story: Leadership Pre-Alignment Interviews

Interview your leaders and surface their pet ideas before building strategy, so reviews don't become fruit rejection.

Read →
Leadership4 steps

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.

Read →
Strategy3 steps

The Kernel of Good Strategy

Every real strategy has three parts: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.

Read →
Strategy4 steps

The Measurement Journey

Start measuring from words and people, then scale into system data — don't wait for perfect.

Read →
Leadership5 steps

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.

Read →
Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Value Deny: Finding Opportunity in What You Can't Buy

List what you should be able to buy but can't, or how a familiar product ought to work but doesn't.

Read →
Self-Mastery5 steps

The Weighted Decision Spreadsheet

List your options, weight your criteria to 100%, score and multiply — then let the reaction tell you the answer.

Read →
Strategy4 steps

Three Worlds Theory of Change

Decide what to actually do about a hard problem by naming the pessimistic, optimistic, and pivotal worlds you might be in

Read →
Communication3 steps

Two-Way Write-Ups

Make written docs conversational with done-reading, Dory questions, and a sentiment table.

Read →

People in these episodes

Related resources

Spot an error or want this page removed? Request a correction or removal.