Richard Rumelt: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think there's this quote in your book that I think is, and this may be paraphrasing, each time you say yes, you risk turning a nascent good strategy into a bad strategy. Yes. Focus is... when I was nine years old, I was at summer camp and I had my parents sent me a magnifying glass and I was out there using the sun to try to cook a piece of wood. I think I had a piece of cloth that I was trying to burn, wasn't having much luck. The magnifying glass focuses the sun's rays on the spot. Counselor came over and he said, "Try this," and he pulled out a black thread from his T-shirt, put it down. And I focused the sun's rays hard, popped out. So stupid little story. But to burn that black thread, there has to be a source of power, the sun. There has to be a focus, that's the magnifying that to the power. And it has to be a target that can be affected. It has to be a black thread, not white thread. And that sequence is part of strategic action. You need a source of power. I say power, I don't say advantage or efficiency. I say power because there are different ways in which power is exhibited and you have to focus the power on a target that can actually be affected or achieved. And this is real simple logic, but it's a discipline to focus power on a target that you can affect. Take American power and say we're going to change China's trajectory and Russia's trajectory and our own and to name all the 30 countries around the world that we're trying... we're diffusing our efforts because they're not the same. They're going in different directions. Obvious when you say it, not so obvious as you live it, because like any organization, like any big organization, US government has different interests. They're pursuing different interests funded for different purposes with different clientele. And so there's gradually a diffusion- And so there's gradually a diffusion of effort. One of the big issues in strategy is simply the organization, complex organizations particularly. You have a hard time focusing energy because of all the different interests. Yeah. Actually I want to talk about both those things, so I'm glad that you teed them up. Let's talk about power. What is this idea of power and how does that play into strategy? Why is it so important? And then what are some examples of power that people can think about when they're trying to think about implementing and adding a power to their strategy?…

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