dog's dinner
Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy is just so full of sense and nuggets that it would be easy to just quote the whole book.
Such is it's dip-in-and-out-ability, it's handy to have at one's side to be referenced on almost any occasion.
This passage seemed to resonate this week as a kind of slice of agency life...
'One form of bad strategic objectives occurs when there is a scrambled mess of things to accomplish—a “dog’s dinner” of strategic objectives.
A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives,” is not a strategy.
It is just a list of things to do.
Such lists usually grow out of planning meetings in which a wide variety of stakeholders make suggestions as to things they would like to see done.
Rather than focus on a few important items, the group sweeps the whole day’s collection into the “strategic plan.”
Then, in recognition that it is a dog’s dinner, the label “long-term” is added so that none of them need be done today.'
