The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
The first part is judgment about which issues are truly important and which are secondary. The second part is judgment about the difficulties of dealing with these issues. And the third part is the ability to focus, to avoid spreading resources too thinly, not trying to do everything at once. The combination of these three parts lead to a focus on
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Mastery over a gnarly challenge arises only after the crux has been exposed when you see or recognize the locus of tension in the web of conflicting desires, needs, and resources.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Most of the time you do not have a single goal but a bundle of ambitions,
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
The connections between potential actions and actual outcomes are unclear.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Alternatives may not be given but must be searched for or imagined.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Diagnosis is quickened by introducing alternative analogies and frames that highlight different issues and different patterns of causation.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Once these challenges have been winnowed down, the next step in filtering is rating their importance and addressability. Importance is the degree to which the challenge either threatens the core values or existence of the enterprise or represents a major opportunity. Addressability is the degree to which the challenge appears to be solvable.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
The crux of the difficulty was the software. Installation had to be tailored to the client’s internal systems, and there were constant updates and bug fixes to manage.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
When you get lost, there are rising feelings of helplessness and anxiety. It is frustrating not knowing which way to go, with the temptation to grasp onto the first hint of a way.12 Those two rocks piled on one another—don’t they mark a path out of the forest? This, to some extent, is the same feeling one has when facing a gnarly strategic challeng
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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 pur
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