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
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
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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 challeng
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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
Clustering places problems and opportunities into groups. When I work with a team in a Strategy Foundry (see Chapter 20), each participant works on identifying a challenge. We write them on the board or on cards and collect them all—usually about twelve or so. Often, these “challenges” are each really more than one challenge, so we break them apart
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There is a large literature on how to generate new ideas—brainstorming, meditation, visualization, collect many before evaluation, hypnagogia, adopting another’s point of view, “what if . . ?”, imaginary mentor, and others. Yet John Dewey’s original argument remains sound. He wrote that the most reliable source of new design ideas is “reflection” o
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Collecting—making a list of problems, issues, and opportunities—ensures that you are looking at all the issues, not just the first to come to mind. It will grow longer than you anticipate, just like what you need to take on vacation grows from your initial planning.
Richard Rumelt • The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists
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
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The crux of the difficulty was the software. Installation had to be tailored to the client’s internal systems, and there were constant updates and bug fixes to manage.