The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
You will have a much harder time dealing with a gnarly challenge if you have not distilled it down to a crux. No one solves a problem they cannot comprehend and hold in their mind.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
My strong advice for a company seeking profitable growth is to restrict your purposes to two: to acquire skills and technologies (including growing platforms) that are complementary to the existing strategy and that would be hard to create internally and to provide broader and stronger market access for the target’s products.
Richard Rumelt • 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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A critical challenge that does not seem easily addressable deserves great attention. Can it be divided into subproblems? Is it like any similar problem others have faced? Is there anyone who might be an expert on such situations? What is changing that might alter its addressability? What is the single keystone constraint, which if broken, would mak
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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
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More Americans start their online shopping at Amazon than on a search engine. The company’s fantastic growth rate has astounded Wall Street and put down many competitors. The company’s strategy is almost totally customer centric and coherently focused on quickness. Its prices are competitive, so there is little incentive to search elsewhere for bet
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All too often the crux of the challenge is not an external threat but a clash among our own ambitions.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
To see the issues more clearly, it is helpful to dig into the difference between deduction and design.
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.