Wielding his vast knowledge on the history of entrepreneurship, he shows how, with something akin to the innocence of a child, business has always been prone to drown in the ‘why’ while being unable to formulate a legitimate ‘how’. The heretic does not offer inspirational slogans; he renounces them. Strategy, in Rumelt’s telling, is not a feeling. It is a discipline grounded in diagnosis, advantage, and action, as in one classic story that predates management theory by a few millennia. 

When David faced Goliath, he recognised an asymmetry. Goliath’s strength - size, armour, brute force - came with a weakness: the unprotected space between his eyes. David’s strength, accuracy with a sling, matched that weakness perfectly. It was David who came away with his opponent’s head. Strategy, Rumelt argues, begins with this kind of diagnosis: understanding the structure of a challenge well enough to see where relative strength meets relative weakness. 

In business, the taking of heads is usually metaphorical, but the logic is identical. The companies that consistently outperform their peers are not the ones with the most ambitious goals or the most stirring ‘why’. They are the ones that discover an asymmetry and organise their actions around it.

Rumelt calls this the ‘kernel’ of strategy: a diagnosis of the situation, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and a set of coherent actions that reinforce one another. 

This is where early‑stage founders go wrong. They confuse goals with strategy. They mistake activity for advantage. They assume that if they can articulate a purpose, the path will reveal itself. Canberra’s startup ecosystem is no exception. Rumelt’s argues that strategy is a science. Strategy is a particular way of winning. 

Rumelt’s framework also exposes why so many strategies fail. Bad strategy, he writes, is characterised by ‘fluff’, failure to address the problem, mistaking goals for strategy, and bad strategic objectives. Canberra founders are not immune. Saying: ‘we want to be the leading pin factory in Australia’ is fluff. By contrast, ‘we will grow by 200 percent next year’ is a goal. ‘We will invest in capex’ is an activity. They are all motion without direction. As one of the anecdotes from the book reveals: a CEO of a graphics art firm Rumelt was consulting once showed him a paper titled ‘2005 Strategic Plan’, setting out an aggressive financial goal of growing 20 percent each year while also retaining a 20 percent margin. Yet neither the document nor its author could answer the quintessential question, ‘What has to happen?’. Ultimately, Rumelt washed his hands of the case. 

Thus, for Rumelt, good strategy is identifiable by its boring clarity. It seems that it is rarely glamorous and often has to be blunt. One notable member of our Canberra community happens to agree. For Michael, CEO and Founder of Espresso Room, strategy is mostly subtraction. ‘It’s choosing what not to pursue.’ The mental trick behind bad business decisions, he told me, is that the inspiring story comes only in hindsight.

‘The real work is specific, repetitive, and often unexciting but that’s exactly why it works.’ 

So how can founders apply these insights practice today, not after a three‑day offsite? 

Start with Rumelt’s first step: diagnosis. Write a single sentence that captures the core of your challenge. Not the symptoms, not the noise, but the structural issue. Suggesting that ‘our customer acquisition cost is too high’ is not a diagnosis. Asserting that ‘our customer acquisition cost is high because our target users do not trust new entrants and require third‑party validation’ is. 

Next, articulate a guiding policy. This is not a plan. It is a principle that shapes your actions. ‘Reduce CAC’ is not a guiding policy. ‘Build trust through institutional partnerships’ is. 

Finally, list coherent actions, perhaps three or five, that reinforce one another. If one’s guiding policy is about trust, one’s actions should all build trust. If one’s guiding policy is about speed, one’s actions should all increase speed. Coherence is what turns a list of tasks into a strategy. Few companies were so good at this as one in particular.  

Two‑thousand‑and‑seven’s company of the year (or what feels like every year since about 2023), NVIDIA, long before the AI hype cycles, diagnosed a simple structural truth about computing: the standard chips used in everyday computers were never going to cope with the kind of heavy, simultaneous calculations that future graphics and AI would demand.

Their guiding policy was equally blunt: bet everything on the kind of computing that could handle that load. By building the layer to handle heavy computing - CUDA, nurturing a developer community, partnering with researchers, and designing chips built specifically for AI‑style workloads, they created a flywheel that carried them all the way to the top of the NASDAQ in 2024. With what now looks like near‑saintly foresight, NVIDIA managed to dominate the two hottest things in computing for three decades: PC gaming and artificial intelligence. The result is not luck, and Jensen Huang never pretends otherwise. It is the compounding effect of a clear diagnosis, a consistent guiding policy, and coherent actions executed with monastic discipline. NVIDIA did not believe harder; it understood the challenge better. 

For Canberra founders like Michael, this discipline is especially valuable. Perhaps the most valuable thing one learns by participating in the Entrepreneurship Club’s community is that the Canberra startup ecosystem rewards clarity. Investors, policymakers, and partners respond to founders who can articulate not just what they want to achieve, but why their approach makes sense. A well‑reasoned ‘how’ often nudges the ‘why’ into place. When you understand your asymmetry, your purpose becomes sharper, not softer. 

In the end, strategy is a way of thinking. And for founders navigating uncertainty, limited resources, and competitive pressure, it is the closest thing to a superpower.