Richard Rumelt Audiobooks

Why most strategy is not strategy at all: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy makes the case

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Who is Richard Rumelt?

Richard Rumelt, born in 1942, is an American author and consultant whose territory is competitive strategy – the question of why some organisations win while others merely mission-statement their way to mediocrity. A career spent advising on strategy, rather than simply theorising about it, is the foundation of his authority on the subject.

We will keep the biography lean rather than embellish it. What can be said plainly is that Rumelt writes as a specialist: strategy is not one of his topics but the topic, and Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, the book that represents him in our catalogue, wears that focus in its title.

Richard Rumelt in audiobooks

Business books are the audiobook format’s home turf, and Good Strategy/Bad Strategy belongs to the category listeners actually finish. The title makes its promise explicit: a working distinction between strategy that does something and strategy that merely sounds as if it does – a distinction anyone who has sat through a corporate away-day will recognise the need for.

For UK listeners, this is commute material with compounding returns: ideas you can test against your own workplace by the time you arrive. Consultant-authors can be windy; a lifelong specialist tends to be the opposite. Take it a chapter at a time and hold each idea up against your own organisation – the book invites exactly that kind of use.