Start with Good Strategy Bad Strategy if your plan is a list of goals without a diagnosis. Use Playing to Win to connect market choices to capabilities and management systems. Choose Obviously Awesome when prospects misunderstand where your product wins against their real alternatives.
Strategy and positioning overlap, but they are not interchangeable. A clearer category cannot repair an incoherent business plan. Conversely, a coherent company strategy can still leave buyers unsure why a product matters. These selections help identify the level at which the confusion lives.
Which book fits your situation?
Good Strategy Bad Strategy
Richard Rumelt
- Choose it when
- Your strategy contains ambitions and initiatives but no decisive challenge.
- What it contributes
- Rumelt’s kernel joins diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent actions.
- Try this next
- Write the obstacle in one paragraph, then check whether each initiative addresses it.
- Where it falls short
- A tidy kernel is only as good as its diagnosis; it does not prove your view of the market.
Playing to Win
A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin
- Choose it when
- Your choices about markets, advantage, and capabilities do not reinforce one another.
- What it contributes
- Lafley and Martin organize strategy as a cascade of choices about where to play, how to win, and what must support that position.
- Try this next
- Identify one market you will not pursue and the capability your chosen market requires.
- Where it falls short
- The cascade exposes dependencies; it does not remove uncertainty about which choices will work.
Obviously Awesome
April Dunford
- Choose it when
- Good-fit customers value the product but new prospects compare it with the wrong alternatives.
- What it contributes
- Dunford derives value, customer fit, and category from real alternatives and distinctive attributes.
- Try this next
- List what customers would use if your product disappeared, then connect differences to value.
- Where it falls short
- Positioning should reflect an advantage customers experience, not a slogan invented in isolation.
Where to start
Diagnose the challenge with Rumelt, check the connected choices with Playing to Win, and use Obviously Awesome for product positioning. If the immediate problem is a confusing sales conversation, start with positioning while keeping the broader strategic assumptions explicit.
Put the reading to work
Take one initiative and finish three sentences: the obstacle is; our choice is; the evidence that would change our choice is. Then explain the customer’s alternative without mentioning your own product. Gaps in either exercise reveal different kinds of strategy work.
The selection, comparisons, and exercises are our editorial synthesis of the linked digests, not quotations or worksheets supplied by the authors. These are starting points, not a complete survey of the field.