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Official skill · Strategy

Strategy kernel

Updated

Writes a one-page strategy kernel (diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions) and tests it, or an existing plan, for the four signs of bad strategy. Use it when A plan is a list of goals and initiatives with no stated problem.

AI skill

Have your AI write a strategy that names the problem and the plan

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Works in Claude, ChatGPT, and coding agents. On Team and Business, the official skill in your pod updates itself when we improve it.

When to use it

What you give it

What you get

A one-page kernel with a diagnosis, a guiding policy and what it rules out, coherent actions, a near-term objective, and a pass/fail bad-strategy test.

How it works

  1. Collect the facts and the existing plan
  2. Write the diagnosis
  3. Write the guiding policy
  4. Write three to five coherent actions
  5. Add a near-term objective
  6. Run the bad-strategy test
  7. End with decisions and next actions

Example

What you give it

We run a meal-kit service in Osaka, 2,400 subscribers. Last year's strategy: 'Become Kansai's most customer-centric food platform. Goals: 30% subscriber growth, launch a corporate lunch line, add vegan boxes, open Kobe, build an app, improve NPS.' Subscribers grew only 4%. Our data: 55% of new subscribers cancel within their first 8 weeks; those who pass 8 weeks stay about 14 months on average. Exit surveys: most say cooking took longer than the 30 minutes we promise. Team of 18, including a head chef with two cooks in our test kitchen, an operations lead, a data lead, and a customer team of 2 led by our head of customer. Decider is the CEO, Mr. Tanaka.

What you get back (the start of it)

Strategy kernel: Osaka meal-kit service

Decider: Mr. Tanaka (CEO) · Date: [date] · Scope: company

Diagnosis

Growth is stuck because new subscribers leave before the habit forms: 55% cancel within 8 weeks, while those who stay past 8 weeks stay about 14 months. Exit surveys point to one cause: recipes take longer than the 30 minutes we promise. The problem is the first 8 weeks, not reach.

Guiding policy

Make the first 8 weeks reliably easy, so more new subscribers reach the point where they stay. We will not: open Kobe, launch the corporate lunch line, or build an app this year.

The rest of this output, the full steps and the checks the AI runs before it answers are in your pod once you add the skill.

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Changelog

Sources

  1. The perils of bad strategy - Richard Rumelt, McKinsey Quarterly, June 2011 (read 2026-11-04)
  2. The perils of bad strategy - archived copy (Internet Archive), dated June 1, 2011 (read 2026-11-04)
  3. Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt - Penguin Random House (read 2026-11-04)
  4. 良い戦略、悪い戦略 - 日経BOOKプラス (read 2026-11-04)
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