Business Strategist Thinking Frameworks
Corporate strategy frameworks from the researchers and consultants who turned strategy into a documented discipline, distilled into .md skill files for Claude, ChatGPT, and every LLM.
Corporate strategy split off from general management as its own documented discipline once researchers started asking why some companies earn durable advantage and others don't, and the practitioners in this collection built the field's working vocabulary. Richard Rumelt's kernel, diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action, argued that most documents called a strategy are actually a list of goals with no diagnosis behind them. Michael Porter's Five Forces gave practitioners a repeatable way to map an industry's actual profit structure instead of guessing at it. Clayton Christensen documented why well-run companies lose to worse products for a specific, structural reason, and built jobs to be done as the fix. Roger Martin's integrative thinking, Hamilton Helmer's seven powers, and Rita McGrath's transient advantage each pushed the field further once static competitive-advantage models stopped matching how fast markets actually moved. This collection captures each practitioner's documented method as downloadable .md skill files for Claude, ChatGPT, and any LLM. Use them when a strategy document is really just a goals list, when an industry's actual profit structure needs mapping, or when a competitive position that used to work has started to erode.
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How business strategists think
- The kernel: Richard Rumelt's structure of diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action, the test for whether a document is an actual strategy or a restated set of goals
- Five Forces: Michael Porter's map of the five structural pressures, rivalry, new entrants, substitutes, supplier power, buyer power, that determine an industry's actual profit potential before any single company's execution enters the picture
- Jobs to be done: Clayton Christensen's reframe of the purchase decision as hiring a product to do a specific job, which explains disruption patterns that market-share data alone misses
- Seven Powers: Hamilton Helmer's documented list of the structural barriers, scale economies, network effects, switching costs, and the rest, that produce durable differential returns rather than temporary ones
- Transient advantage: Rita McGrath's case that in fast-moving markets a string of temporary advantages, deliberately built and abandoned on schedule, beats chasing one durable moat that no longer exists
Frameworks in this category
Richard Rumelt
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy & the Kernel
Michael Porter
Five Forces & Competitive Advantage
Clayton Christensen
Disruption & Jobs to Be Done
Roger Martin
Playing to Win & Integrative Thinking
Hamilton Helmer
7 Powers & Durable Differential Returns
W. Chan Kim
Blue Ocean Strategy
Gary Hamel
Core Competence & Management Innovation
Rita McGrath
Transient Advantage & Discovery-Driven Planning
Kenichi Ohmae
The Mind of the Strategist
When to use these frameworks
- Diagnosing whether a strategy document actually contains a diagnosis, or just a list of goals dressed up as one
- Mapping an industry's structural profit potential before committing to a competitive position within it
- Understanding why a well-run incumbent is losing share to a worse product
- Deciding whether a competitive advantage is durable or a transient window that needs a plan for what comes after it
- Choosing where to compete and where deliberately not to, given limited resources
Start here
Richard Rumelt
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy & the Kernel
Adjacent thinking
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from Military Strategist?
Military Strategist collects historical command doctrine, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Eisenhower, drawn from documented wartime leadership. This category collects documented business practice specifically, researchers and consultants writing about corporate competitive positioning, not historical military command. If a competitive metaphor is what you're after, the Military Strategist category is the closer fit; for a diagnostic business framework, this category is built for that directly.
Will this write my strategy for me?
No. These are diagnostic frameworks, not a template you fill in. Rumelt's own documented position is that strategy is diagnosis plus coherent action, not a fill-in-the-blanks document, and every framework in this collection is built to sharpen that diagnosis, not to generate a finished strategy on your behalf.
Do I need an MBA to use these?
No. Each framework distills the practitioner's documented method into a working set of mental models and questions, built for direct application, not for the vocabulary of a strategy course. The concepts hold up without the credential.
Blue Ocean Strategy has two names attached to it. Why is this framework credited to only one?
It isn't. Blue Ocean Strategy is the documented joint work of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, published together, and this framework attributes the model to both of them throughout rather than assigning sole credit to whichever name appears in the file's title.
Are Porter's and Christensen's frameworks in conflict with each other?
They answer different questions rather than competing for the same one. Porter's Five Forces diagnoses an industry's existing structure; Christensen's disruption theory explains how a new entrant rewrites that structure from underneath an incumbent that was optimizing correctly for the market as it existed. Used together they cover more of the picture than either does alone.
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