The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Strategy is a form of problem solving, and you cannot solve a problem you have not understood. Deepening your understanding of the challenges being faced is the process of diagnosis. In diagnosis the strategist seeks to understand why certain challenges have become salient, about the forces at work, and why the challenge seems difficult.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
How does insight happen? It springs upon us, taking us by surprise. Or it arises unasked, catching us in the middle of some unconnected activity. An insight “feels right,” its truth self-evident. And we are unaware of how insight is attained. Introspection fails to reveal the underlying process.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
These kinds of intents and dreams are precursors to strategy, but they cannot all be accomplished, or at least not all at once.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Locating the crux is the first maneuver in dealing with gnarly challenges. Discovering, or articulating, that solvable problem within the complexity of a gnarly challenge is not easy.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
they did not see strategy as a fixed description of “where we want to be” in the future. Of course, they had obvious ambitions of winning, and profit, and success, but they saw strategy as dealing with on-the-ground challenges and with important new opportunities that arose.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
If you conceive of strategy as decision making, then your job would be to examine each alternative and select the best. You don’t have to be an experienced executive to see that this is nonsense. Where do these “alternatives” come from?
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Real-life strategy, whether your own or a company’s, is an ongoing process of dealing with critical challenges and deciding what consequential actions to take.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Two key elements in stock-market value creation for an existing company are strategy effectiveness and extension. Effectiveness comes first because extending an ineffective system builds an even larger future problem. And both must be better than expected to have an equity-market payoff. Strategic effectiveness in a business is the combination of t
... See moreRichard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
As understanding deepens, the strategist seeks the crux—the one challenge that both is critical and appears to be solvable. This narrowing down is the source of much of the strategist’s power, as focus remains the cornerstone of strategy.