The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

To be a strategist you will need to embrace the full complex and confusing force of the challenges and opportunities you face. To be a strategist you will have to develop a sense for the crux of the problem—the place where a commitment to action will have the best chance of surmounting the most critical obstacles. To be a strategist you will need p

I call what passes the joint filters of critical importance and addressability an ASC (addressable strategic challenge). The number of ASCs that can be simultaneously worked depends on the size and resource depth of the organization and the graveness of the most serious.

In all cases, strategy is the process of confronting and solving critical challenges. I emphasize this because there is a widespread misconception that a business strategy is some sort of long-range sketch of a desired destination. I encourage you to think of strategy as a journey through, over, and around a sequence of challenges.

Strategic effectiveness in a business is the combination of the unique value you are able to create and how strongly that position resists competitive erosion and imitation. Creating value means being able to provide products and services that buyers value more highly than it costs to make them. A good measure of value is the value gap—the differen

Start with the challenge, and diagnose its structure and the forces at work.

Experienced designers can be seen to engage with a novel problem situation by searching for the central paradox, asking themselves what it is that makes the problem so hard to solve. They only start working toward a solution once the nature of the core paradox has been established to their satisfaction.

I think of strategic challenges as arising in three basic forms: choice, engineering design, and gnarly. Most that I see are gnarly, perhaps because companies don’t ask for help with easier ones.

A more difficult situation is the gnarly-design challenge. Here there are no given alternatives, and there are no good engineering-type models to test your designs against. There is no guarantee of a solution of any kind. There are not clear causal connections between actions and outcomes. You solve a gnarly challenge by beginning to dig into the n

Saying “We are always increasing sales and cutting costs” is just not convincing. Saying “Our paint company is going to beat all the other paint companies because we are customer focused” doesn’t work either. To have someone believe you and trust in your strategy, there has to be a logic and argument, and some evidence, as to how you are dealing wi