The Richard Rumelt
Framework
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy & the Kernel
Richard Rumelt represents one of the most distinctive thinking patterns in their field. Richard Rumelt's approach, captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask.
The good strategy, bad strategy & the kernel framework distils Richard Rumelt's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds.
Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Richard Rumelt made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Richard Rumelt's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.
A glimpse of Richard Rumelt's thinking.
Good strategy is not a vision statement or a financial target. It is a coherent response to a specific, correctly diagnosed challenge, and coherence means the diagnosis, the guiding policy, and the coordinated actions must lock together so that each element reinforces the others. Most organizations produce "bad strategy" not from incompetence but from a structural incentive to avoid the hard political work of choosing what not to do.
The job of the strategist is to name the critical obstacle, design a policy that leverages a real source of advantage against that obstacle, and then concentrate resources so the actions actually move the needle rather than spreading effort across every competing priority.
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Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples, unlocked with purchase.
What is the single most important obstacle between this organization and the outcome it claims to want, and is that obstacle actually named anywhere in the strategy document?
4 more questions in Richard Rumelt's voice are unlocked with purchase.
Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.
The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Richard Rumelt actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.
Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.
- ✦Core philosophy: 2–3 sentences grounded in Richard Rumelt's documented worldview
- ✦Five signature mental models: each named, with concrete examples from their work
- ✦Decision heuristics: the concrete rules they actually used
- ✦Signature questions: five questions that sound like Richard Rumelt, not a generic MBA
- ✦What they would NOT do: the anti-patterns this framework rejects
- ✦Copy-paste activation prompt: drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
- ✦Worked example: the framework applied to a realistic scenario
- →richard-rumelt.zip: a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to
~/.claude/skills/ - →richard-rumelt-framework.md: plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts, anywhere
What it does with a real question.
A founder is deciding whether to take a large but difficult client.
Decide on the diagnosis, not the invoice. The question "big but difficult client: yes or no?" skips the prior one: what is the actual obstacle between this company and the position the founder wants in two years? If the binding constraint is cash runway, a large client may be the right medicine, difficulty and all. If it is lack of a reference customer in a segment where rivals are weak, the client may be valuable for a different reason. If it is a stretched team that cannot deliver well to anyone, a difficult client makes the disease worse. Each diagnosis points to a different answer, and a founder who cannot say which one is true is about to decide on appetite rather than strategy.
My position: take the client only if it passes a ruling-out test. Taking it must force you to stop doing something specific, such as bespoke work for small accounts, or a product direction that pulls engineers away from the core. If the client is added on top of everything else, it will quietly become your whole roadmap, and the founder will have outsourced the guiding policy to the customer's escalation emails.
The concrete next move: write one sentence naming the challenge this client is meant to solve, then list the two things you will refuse to do while serving them. If you cannot write the sentence, or the refusal list comes out empty, decline politely, or offer a narrower scope with clear boundaries.
The full framework carries five models, decision heuristics, signature questions and a worked example.
Written by claude-sonnet-5-5 with this framework loaded, 2026-10-11. Checked automatically for length and for copied framework text.
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Inspired by the documented thinking of Richard Rumelt. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.