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The Strategy Kernel
Rumelt's kernel, the four bad-strategy tells, Larson's bottom-up recipe, and a six-question review checklist. Keep it beside any strategy doc you read or write.
The kernel — three parts, no substitutes
Every good strategy has the same logical skeleton (Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy). Missing any part means it isn't a strategy yet.
| Part | What it is | One-line test |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Diagnosis | An honest, evidenced account of what is actually going on — the critical challenge, named. The hard part. | Would someone reading it wince a little because it's true? |
| 2 · Guiding policy | The overall approach chosen to address the diagnosis — including what it rules out. A policy that forbids nothing is fluff. | Can you name a reasonable thing this policy forbids? |
| 3 · Coherent action | Concrete, coordinated moves that carry out the policy and reinforce each other — not a grab-bag backlog. | Does each action trace back to the diagnosis? |
The four tells of bad strategy (Rumelt)
| Tell | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Fluff | Buzzwords restating the obvious — "world-class", "best-in-class", "customer-centric excellence". Gibberish masquerading as insight. |
| Failure to face the challenge | No diagnosis. If the doc never names the real problem, there is no way to evaluate — or improve — the strategy. |
| Mistaking goals for strategy | Ambitions presented as approach: "reach 99.99% availability", "10x velocity". A goal is where you want to be; strategy is how you'll get there. |
| Bad objectives | Action lists that are impracticable, or a long grab-bag of unrelated wishes that fail to address the challenge — a to-do list, not coordinated action. |
Larson's bottom-up recipe: write five, then synthesize
- Write (or gather) five design docs for real problems in your area.
- Synthesize the strategy: look across them for repeated dilemmas, controversial decisions, and contested trade-offs — write the doc that guides those trade-offs and explains the rationale.
- Write five strategies (over time, across areas).
- Synthesize the vision: extrapolate how their trade-offs interact over the next two to three years and reconcile them into one picture.
Good strategy is boring and specific — it often feels too obvious to bother writing down. That feeling is a sign you're doing it right, not wrong.
Strategy-doc review checklist — six questions
- Is there a diagnosis at all — a named challenge, not a conclusion smuggled in ("we must modernize") or a list of ambitions?
- Is the diagnosis evidenced and uncomfortable — at least one sentence backed by a number, incident, or trend that someone would rather not see written down?
- Does the guiding policy exclude something — can you name a reasonable option it forbids? Would a skeptical peer dispute it? If nobody could disagree, it decided nothing.
- Does every action trace to the diagnosis — no orphan initiatives riding along because they were already planned?
- Do the actions reinforce each other — or do any two of them pull in opposite directions (funding the platform while blessing every bespoke pipeline)?
- Is it one page — short enough that people will actually read it, remember it, and use it to make the next contested decision?
Sources: Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy (2011); Will Larson, "Writing an engineering strategy" (2023), "Write five, then synthesize" (2020), and Crafting Engineering Strategy (O'Reilly, 2025). Companion lesson: Lesson 10 — Writing Technical Strategy.