The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

But where do such goals come from? Apparently, they somehow pop into existence. They magically appear before any analysis has taken place. If you haven’t analyzed your business, its competitors, the dynamics of competition, and more, claiming that you want to “be the technology leader” is just vague bloviation.

Climbers call such boulders “problems” and describe the toughest part as “the crux.” In the case of the Cul de Chien, you cannot get up with just strength or ambition. You have to solve the puzzle of the crux and have the courage to make delicate moves almost two stories above the ground.

In arriving at a clearheaded diagnosis, two powerful tools are reframing and analogy, that is, building a mapping between your specific challenge and similar situations faced by others at different times and places.

But a goal set arbitrarily, without an analysis or understanding of a critical challenge or opportunity, is an unsupported goal. By contrast, a good goal is the result of effective strategy work that targets certain actions that will move the organization forward. To avoid confusion, it is best to call this an objective to distinguish it from an un

These kinds of intents and dreams are precursors to strategy, but they cannot all be accomplished, or at least not all at once.

One of the most powerful foundry tools is boiling the situation down to a few addressable strategic challenges, or ASCs. The crux of the situation will normally reside there. Searching for the few limited challenges that are both very important and that can be overcome is the core of the Strategy Foundry.

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.

Ryanair’s cost of carrying most passengers was about equal to its fares. Its profit came from its fees—the charges for baggage, for priority boarding, for fast-tracking through security, for choosing your seat, for chips and drinks aboard.

One interesting result, common in such exercises, was that a few challenges were deemed fairly easy to address. In this case, the AMD challenge was seen as “business as usual” for Intel.