What Richard Rumelt thinks about design
Strategy scholar and author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (2011) and The Crux (2022); taught for over four decades at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, earlier an engineer at JPL.
Richard Rumelt did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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1 dated position, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Richard Rumelt has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsPhyllis’s working specification was a deliberate resolution of ambiguity into an actionable description. It was the bridge from “we don’t know” to “we are building.” Her specification passed on to the engineers a simpler problem—not one that was easy, but one that was solvable. With that assumption in place, design work could begin.