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.

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 to do everything at once. The combination of these three parts lead to a focus on

To see the issues more clearly, it is helpful to dig into the difference between deduction and design.

Diagnosis is quickened by introducing alternative analogies and frames that highlight different issues and different patterns of causation.

The connections between potential actions and actual outcomes are unclear.

There is an old aphorism that the key to strategy is playing the games you can win. Of course, life is not a game, nor is corporate management or statecraft. But the essential idea of focusing where you can “win” is neither trivial nor always followed.

THE IDEA THAT a person or organization has one or two primary driving goals is simply not true. It is a fantasy invented by economists and certain management thinkers. The reality is that most people and organizations have “a bundle of ambitions.”

Strategy began when people realized that telling warriors to ‘go out and fight the invaders’ didn’t work. Leaders had to impose a structure, a design, on how the group would fight. In a modern business, a strategy is the exercise of power to make parts of the system do things they would not do, if left to themselves.”

strategy is a mixture of policy and action designed to surmount a crucial challenge