Business Strategist

The Rita McGrath Framework

Transient Advantage & Discovery-Driven Planning

IncludedNative Claude Skill + plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
★★★★★
4.9 rating·3040 downloads

Rita McGrath represents one of the most distinctive thinking patterns in their field. Rita McGrath's approach — captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask. The transient advantage & discovery-driven planning framework distils Rita McGrath'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 Rita McGrath made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Rita McGrath's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.

Inside the framework

A glimpse of Rita McGrath's thinking.

Core Philosophy

Competitive advantage is not a destination to be defended indefinitely but a wave to be surfed and eventually abandoned before it crashes. McGrath's core conviction, built from studying hundreds of high-velocity markets, is that the companies which survive disruption are those that treat advantage as transient by design, not by accident. Discovery-Driven Planning operationalizes this by converting strategy from a prediction exercise into a structured learning process, where assumptions are made explicit, tested cheaply, and revised before capital is fully committed.

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 assumptions embedded in this plan, if wrong, would make the entire investment thesis collapse, and how quickly could we test each one for under $50,000?

4 more questions in Rita McGrath's voice are unlocked with purchase.

What Rita McGrath Would NOT Do · sample
✗McGrath would not build a five-year strategic plan with a single financial scenario and present it as a forecast. A single-scenario plan is a statement of hope dressed as analysis. She would insist on a reverse income statement that surfaces the required assumptions and a set of milestone-based checkpoints that allow the plan to be revised as those assumptions are tested against reality.

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 Rita McGrath 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 Rita McGrath'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 Rita McGrath, 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
  • →rita-mcgrath.zip — a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to ~/.claude/skills/
  • →rita-mcgrath-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 Rita McGrath. 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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