The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Experienced designers can be seen to engage with a novel problem situation by searching for the central paradox, asking themselves what it is that makes the problem so hard to solve. They only start working toward a solution once the nature of the core paradox has been established to their satisfaction.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Define the problem
To be a strategist you will need to embrace the full complex and confusing force of the challenges and opportunities you face. To be a strategist you will have to develop a sense for the crux of the problem—the place where a commitment to action will have the best chance of surmounting the most critical obstacles. To be a strategist you will need p
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Second, understand the sources of power and leverage that are relevant to your situation.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Saying “We are always increasing sales and cutting costs” is just not convincing. Saying “Our paint company is going to beat all the other paint companies because we are customer focused” doesn’t work either. To have someone believe you and trust in your strategy, there has to be a logic and argument, and some evidence, as to how you are dealing wi
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In all cases, strategy is the process of confronting and solving critical challenges. 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.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
A strategy is a mixture of policy and action designed to surmount a high-stakes challenge.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
I think of strategic challenges as arising in three basic forms: choice, engineering design, and gnarly. Most that I see are gnarly, perhaps because companies don’t ask for help with easier ones.
Richard P. Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
Take an MBA course on strategy, and you will be exposed to a few case studies of classic business-strategy success stories. But, increasingly, your instructor will use these cases as “examples” of his or her favorite concepts from industrial organization economics. Again, you cannot deduce a good strategy from theory. Much of design is a combinatio
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I call what passes the joint filters of critical importance and addressability an ASC (addressable strategic challenge). The number of ASCs that can be simultaneously worked depends on the size and resource depth of the organization and the graveness of the most serious.