The Perils of Bad Strategy

Bad strategy abounds, says UCLA management professor Richard Rumelt.  Senior executives who can spot it  stand a much better chance of creating good strategies.

Horatio Nelson had a problem. The British admiral’s fleet was outnumbered at Trafalgar by an armada of French and Spanish ships that Napoleon had ordered to disrupt Britain’s commerce and pre-pare for a cross-channel invasion. The prevailing tactics in 1805 were for the two opposing fleets to stay in line, firing broadsides at each other. But Nelson had a strategic insight into how to deal with being outnumbered. He broke the British fleet into two columns and drove them at the Franco-Spanish fleet, hitting its line perpendicularly.

The lead British ships took a great risk, but Nelson judged that the less-trained Franco Spanish gunners would not be able to compensate for the heavy swell that day and that the enemy fleet, with its coherence  lost, would be no match for the more experienced British captains and gunners in the ensuing melee. He was proved right: the French and Spanish lost 22 ships, two-thirds of their fleet. The British lost none.

Nelson’s victory is a classic example of good strategy, which almost always looks this simple and obvious in retrospect. It does not pop out of some strategic-management tool, matrix, triangle, or fill-in-the-blanks scheme. Instead, a talented leader has identified the one or two critical issues in a situation—the pivot points that can multiply the effectiveness of effort—and then focused and concentrated action and resources on them.

ACTION POINT: A good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision; it honestly acknowledges the challenges we face  and provides an approach to overcoming them.