The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

Formulating a hypothesis about what will work follows from filtering the set of issues and breaking gnarly challenges into components. The design of action alternatives is the second maneuver in dealing with gnarly challenges.

Diagnosis will always reveal multiple challenges. To focus, some challenges must be put aside or deferred. One must choose which challenges to confront. In this sense, the crux itself may be a choice. Choose the crux that strikes at critical issues and can be surmounted, a logic exemplified in Plan Dog.

To expect to make a business work under competition, you need to have an advantage in knowledge or resources or both.

Strategy means asking, or making, people do things that break with routine and focus collective effort and resources on new, or nonroutine, purposes.

After several hours of discussion, each of the five participants was asked to score the challenges on importance and their addressability. That is, how strategically critical was each challenge for Intel, and how likely was it that Intel could successfully address that challenge over the next three to four years?

Diagnosis is the starting point in creating a strategy.

To see the issues more clearly, it is helpful to dig into the difference between deduction and design.

Effective strategy emerges out of an exploration of challenges, ambitions, resources, and competition. By confronting the situation actually being faced, a talented leader creates a strategy to further some elements out of the whole bundle of ambitions.

The trick, I said, is that “you need to know something special about this business, to have an approach based on a special appreciation of the situation or on special information. To develop this appreciation, you need to decide which is the more important focus, aerobics or Mammoth. Then, immerse yourself in that subject. Learn about the people, t

When you try a new route on a mountain, you do not have a clear map of exactly how you will get to the top. Your plan is normally more like “Let’s go up that gully and exit on the ledge to the left. Then we will see if that crack above goes.” On the ledge above, you may see that the crack doesn’t go and search for a different way forward, perhaps a