The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

Start with the Challenge The single most important element of the Strategy Foundry is a focus on identifying and diagnosing the challenges facing the organization. Starting with the challenge defuses attempts to make favorite projects and goals the center of discussion. Starting with the challenge opens up minds to problem solving rather than the m

He began to see the crux of the challenge at Disney in its much-admired classic animated films such as Cinderella. These almost defined Disney to each generation when they were rereleased, but they could not be replicated.

Single women were “spinsters” because they mostly spun thread for sale to others for garment making.

Yet John Dewey’s original argument remains sound. He wrote that the most reliable source of new design ideas is “reflection” on a “felt difficulty.”11 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 ass

Following collecting and clustering, you realize that there are too many issues, too many problems, and too many different interests at work. They need to be filtered. The first step is sequencing: bringing to the forefront those that seem to be immediate, while deferring attention on many where action can be deferred.

Deng Xiaoping saw that China’s crux economic problem was dulled incentives to be efficient

The critical comment, one that pointed at the crux, was by the engineer who defended his idea about vehicle sensors by saying, “If our market is saturated, we have to find a market that isn’t.”

began to use the term crux to denote the outcome of a three-part strategic skill. 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

Benioff adopted a symbol showing the word software with a red slash through it and coupled it with the slogan “No software.”