Good Strategy / Bad Strategy

Richard Rumelt clearly knows strategy cold, and the content here is genuinely good. But he opens the book in a way that rubbed me wrong. Early on he tells a story about sitting across from a CEO. He mentions he works in strategy, and the CEO tells him the only real strategy is to be relentlessly persistent and push forward on everything. Rumelt says he completely disagrees. I get both sides. But Rumelt is an academic who, as far as I can tell, has never actually run a company, and that's exactly why his disagreement comes off as arrogant and a little pedantic. Here's the thing the CEO understood and Rumelt doesn't seem to: even if every word Rumelt writes about strategy is correct, companies that fail are far more likely to die from a lack of perseverance, from frustration and giving up, than from bad strategy. The CEO was right, and Rumelt is too certain of his own expertise to see it. Anyone can pick up a book, study hard, and become an expert on a topic. Very few people can actually run a company well. So I find it ironic that someone writing a strategy book aimed mostly at the people running companies manages to alienate that exact audience in the opening pages. It made me laugh. The whole time I kept thinking that strategy is a lot like software architecture. There's so much whiteboard masturbation, so much ideation with zero empirical evidence behind it, and in many cases it's worthless because reality shows up and proves that some things just can't be designed in advance. Strategy has the exact same disease. You can draw the most beautiful plan on the board and reality will still do whatever it wants. None of this means the book is bad. The content is solid and there's a lot to learn here. I just wish the messenger were a little more humble.