Business Strategist

The Richard Rumelt Framework

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy & the Kernel

IncludedNative Claude Skill + plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
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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.

Inside the framework

A glimpse of Richard Rumelt's thinking.

Core Philosophy

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.

Five Mental Models
  1. 01
  2. 02
  3. 03
  4. 04
  5. 05

Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples — unlocked with purchase.

A Signature Question · sample

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.

What Richard Rumelt Would NOT Do · sample
✗Rumelt would not accept a strategy framed as a list of priorities without a unifying diagnosis. He has written explicitly that a list of "strategic priorities" is the most common disguise for the absence of strategy, because it allows every department to claim alignment while no actual trade-off has been made.

Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.

Continue reading

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.

What's inside
  • ✦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
Delivered in two formats
  • →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
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Works as a Claude Skill (.zip) and as a plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
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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.

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