Richard Rumelt

Changes don't come along in nice annual packages, so the need for strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.

— Richard Rumelt

[ Diversification strategy is] a firm’s commitment to diversity per se, together with the strengths, skills or purposes that span this diversity, shown by the way in which business activities are related one to another.

— Richard Rumelt

[In related businesses] common skill, market or resource applies to each.

— Richard Rumelt

The enhanced ability to obtain external funding and ... capacity to deploy capital internally to the most promising of a wide range of divisional ventures.

— Richard Rumelt

It is commonly accepted that successful performance of a firm hinges on restricting activities to cultivating a related and familiar range rather than 'bold moves into uncharted'.

— Richard Rumelt

Ambiguity as to what factors are responsible for superior (or inferior) performance acts as a powerful block on both imitation and factor mobility.

— Richard Rumelt

In summary, uncertain imitability obtains shen creation of new production functions is inherently uncertain and when either causal ambiguity or property rights in unique resources impede imitation and factor mobility.

— Richard Rumelt

A major advancement in the strategy field is the development of models where firm heterogeneity is an endogenous creation of economic actors.

— Richard Rumelt

For Schumpeter the most important firms are those that serve as the vehicles for action of the real drivers of the system — the innovating entrepreneurs.

— Richard Rumelt

Some of the biggest changes have been in the process of generating business strategies—what I call “strategy work.” Around 1980, the received wisdom was to decentralize into business units, which would each generate a strategic plan. These plans were then amalgamated up the hierarchy, in some portfolio way, for senior management. That approach has all but disappeared, and we’ve seen a dramatic recentralization of strategy work.

— Richard Rumelt

Back in the mid-1990s I was researching strategy in the global electronics industry. I interviewed 20 to 30 executives, CEOs, and division managers and asked fairly simple questions. Which company was the leader in their market? How did that company become the leader? What’s their own company’s strategy?

— Richard Rumelt

Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, “vision,” planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

— Richard Rumelt

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.

— Richard Rumelt

Given that background, I was interested in what Steve Jobs might say about the future of Apple. His survival strategy for Apple, for all its skill and drama, was not going to propel Apple into the future. At that moment in time, Apple had less than 4 percent of the personal computer market. The de facto standard was Windows-Intel and there seemed to be no way for Apple to do more than just hang on to a tiny niche.

— Richard Rumelt

A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives.

— Richard Rumelt

When organizations are unable to make new strategies — when people evade the work of choosing among different paths in the future — then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership’s insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices.

— Richard Rumelt

The kernel of strategy contains three elements:

— Richard Rumelt

A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge. It is not defined by the pay grade of the person authorizing the action.

— Richard Rumelt