Good Strategy-Bad Strategy: Post #7 The Kernel--Diagnosis

The Diagnosis: This step tries to answer the question: What’s going on here? Like medicine, leaders look for emergent patterns when trying to diagnose a problem. And reducing overly complex situations to a story or an analogy can often help leaders from becoming hopelessly stuck. Rumelt uses the Lou Gerstner story at IBM as a way to approach diagnosis. Gerstner determined that IBM needed to move from an integrated IT model to an integrated consulting model focused more on the customer than the technology. That story began to penetrate the market and change the course of IBM’s slump in the mid ‘90s.