Effective people gain insight through finding and concentrating attention on the crux of a challenge—the part of the tangle of issues that is both very important and addressable (which can be overcome with reasonable surety).

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.

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

The key source of design insight is a clearheaded diagnosis of the structure of the challenge, especially its crux, by employing a tool kit of persistence, analogy, point of view, making explicit assumptions, asking why, and recognizing your unconscious constraints.

Third, avoid the bright, shiny distractions that abound. Don’t spend days on mission statements; don’t start with goals in strategy work. Don’t confuse management tools with strategy, and don’t get too caught up in the ninety-day chase around quarterly earnings results.

Insight does not automatically awaken at our call. It cannot be guaranteed, but it can be aided. If you have not grasped the thorns of the problem, you cannot expect insight into a solution. Insight is helped by practice at the feel of sliding and shifting points of view. Insight into strategy is much aided by understanding the power of focusing

Don’t start with goals—start by understanding the challenge and finding its crux.

To be a strategist you have to take responsibility for external challenges, but also for the health of the organization itself. To be a strategist you will have to balance a host of issues with your bundle of ambitions—the variety of purposes, values, and beliefs that you and other stakeholders wish to support. To be a strategist you will have to

Take an MBA course on strategy, and you will be exposed to a few case studies of classic business-strategy success stories. But, increasingly, your instructor will use these cases as “examples” of his or her favorite concepts from industrial organization economics. Again, you cannot deduce a good strategy from theory. Much of design is a