Once you develop the ability to detect bad strategy, you will dramatically improve your effectiveness at judging, influencing, and creating strategy. To detect a bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks.
Fluff
Fluff is superficial restatement of the obvious combined with a generous sprinkling of buzzwords. Fluff masquerades as expertise, thought, and analysis.
Failure to Face the Problem
A strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it is difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy. And if you cannot assess a strategy’s quality, you cannot reject a bad strategy or improve a good one.
Mistaking Goals for Strategy
What has to happen for it to be realized? It skips over the annoying fact that no one has a clue as to how to get there. Bad strategy is long on goals and short on policy or action. It assumes that goals are all you need.
Bad Strategic Objectives
Use the word "goal" to express overall values and desires and to use the word "objective" to denote specific operational targets. It is strategy which transforms these vague overall goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives.
Also... - Having conflicting goals, dedicating resources to unconnected targets, and accommodating incompatible interests make for bad strategy. - Universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice.
Rumelt, R. (2011). Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Currency.