The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Don’t start with goals—start by understanding the challenge and finding its crux.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
When there are many conflicting desires, and conflicting theories about how they can be met, the consequences are indecision and myopic vacillation among various half measures. Creating effective strategy in such situations is extremely difficult or impossible. The central challenge is not the outside world but the conflicting mix of values and
... See moreRichard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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
... See moreRichard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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
... See moreRichard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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).
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
The concept of a crux narrows attention to a critical issue. A strategy is a mix of policy and action designed to overcome a significant challenge. The art of strategy is in defining a crux that can be mastered and in seeing or designing a way through it.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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.