The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

It is not about setting overall performance goals. For this reason, it is important that a Strategy Foundry be held separately from any budgeting process.

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

Diagnosis is the starting point in creating a strategy.

Strategies are usually what I call “corner solutions.” The phrase comes from linear programming, where the solution to a problem is normally a set of actions defined by the intersection of various constraints—geometrically, a corner of intersecting lines or planes. When the constraints are so strong that no solution is possible, I call the strategy

I emphasize this because there is a widespread misconception that a business strategy is some sort of long-range sketch of a desired destination. I encourage you to think of strategy as a journey through, over, and around a sequence of challenges.

SUCCESS LEADS TO plenty, which leads to laxity.

Alternative actions are not given but must be imagined or constructed. Then you do your very best to choose among the alternatives you have created. Finally, you need to translate the idea into specific and coherent actions. In shaping and evaluating an alternative course of action, we have to make judgments. And to invent a solution, we have to ju

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.

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.