“Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, “vision,” planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

Good Strategy is not an entertainment read -- let's get that out on the table from the jump.

Rumelt's book is all about the prospect of strategy: what, exactly it is (not what you or I may have thought), how it works and why it works. He even goes deep into what makes good and bad strategy as the title suggests.

Good Strategy is very information-heavy, the type of book I had to read in compete silence as opposed to music in the background or for a few minutes while waiting on a take-out food order. Rumelt's writing is very textbook-ish, in a good way. This is not the book you pick up for fun. This is a book I'd recommend to anyone who is seriously interested in learning how to craft and critically analyze their own maneuvers, past and present, for the cold truth of effectiveness (or lack thereof).