The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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. We may want to expand capacity but have no space to do so. The suggested new product may work well for customers but be rejected by distributors because it cannibalizes
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This is the adjacent possible
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
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For the strategist, focus is not just attention. It means bringing a source of power to bear on a selected target. If the power is weak, nothing happens. If it is strong but scattered and diffused across targets, nothing happens. If power is focused on the wrong target, nothing happens. But when power is focused on the right target, breakthroughs
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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.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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
To expect to make a business work under competition, you need to have an advantage in knowledge or resources or both.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Real-life business strategy is a bit like that route up a mountain. You may have an ambition to get to the top of a particular peak, but the route requires overcoming a series of difficulties. Climbers call them “problems.” And, as each difficulty is overcome, there are new views of the problems and opportunities that lie ahead. And, if you make
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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.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
There can be many motivations for acquisitions. Companies try to pick early winners. They try to exploit economies of scale. They try to change their own culture with the injection of a new culture. They believe they can fix a broken target company. They try to consolidate an industry.