Rumelt Notes

Richard Rumelt helps leaders cut through strategic confusion and focus on what matters.

For four decades, he has worked with CEOs, boards, and senior teams facing their most critical challenges—from Fortune 100 technology companies navigating platform competition to national defense organizations redefining their strategic positioning. His clients don't get platitudes or frameworks. They get clarity: a sharp diagnosis of their situation and a coherent path forward.

As author of Good Strategy Bad Strategy and The Crux, Rumelt has shaped how a generation of executives thinks about strategy. His work has been translated into twenty languages and taught at leading business schools worldwide. But his real impact happens in the room—where he helps leaders identify the crux of their challenge and design the focused action required to overcome it.

Before academia, Rumelt was a systems engineer at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he worked on what became the Voyager mission to the outer planets. That early training in complex systems—where a single error means mission failure—formed his insistence that strategy must be a coherent design, not a collection of aspirations.

Whether advising a leadership team or delivering a keynote, Rumelt brings the same discipline: relentless diagnosis, strategic focus, and the courage to say what others avoid.