Richard Rumelt

discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.

That question is ‘What’s going on here?’”

Importantly, none of these diagnoses can be proven to be correct—each is a judgment about which issue is preeminent. Hence, diagnosis is a judgment about the meanings of facts.

Nevertheless, strategy is primarily about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. It is a hard discipline because focusing on one thing slights another

Ford’s special genius was in materials, industrial engineering, and promotion.

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:

1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often

said, “It looks to me as if there is really only one question you are asking in each case. That question is ‘What’s going on here?’”

John’s comment was something I had never heard said explicitly, but it was instantly and obviously correct. A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

a minimum, a diagnosis names or classifies the situation, linking facts into patterns and suggesting that more attention be paid to some issues and less to others. An especially insightful diagnosis can transform one’s view of the situ

actions and outcomes were unclear. Because the challenge was ill-structured, a real-world strategy could not be logically deduced from the observed facts. Rather, a diagnosis had to be an educated guess as to what was going on in the situation, especially about what was critically important