The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists - Book Review

Book Review #17

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” - Richard Rumelt quotes Mike Tyson's legendary words in this excellent book titled - "The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists".

Richard busts the myth that a concoction of vision, mission and goals is strategy. He uses a mountaineering analogy to explain how overcoming the most difficult section/precipice is 'The Crux' of conquering a climb. Likewise, identifying the one most important 'gnarly challenge' in a business is indeed 'The Crux' of developing strategy.

Here are my key takeaways from the book.

1) The problem for most businesses is that strategic-planning exercises do not produce strategies. They rather attempt to predict and control financial outcomes (they are just a form of budgeting). After glancing at broader issues, it quickly centers on financial goals followed by budget allocations

2) Don’t start with goals — When a leader sets a goal, it is actually a decision on what is important and where resources and energy will go. Instead, start by understanding the challenge and finding its crux. Strategic challenges arise in three forms: choice, engineering design, but most often gnarly

3) Faced with a gnarly challenge, the strategist recognizes/forges an embedded solvable problem — not the whole gnarly challenge, but one with kinship to its key elements. And it is a problem that is possible to address

4) 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

5) The concept of a crux narrows attention to a critical issue. The art of strategy is in defining a crux that can be mastered and in seeing or designing a way through it

6) 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 thin, not trying to do everything at once. The combination of these three parts lead to a focus on the crux—the most important part of a set of challenges that is addressable, having a good chance of being solved by coherent action

7) The distinction between strategy and tactics arises in the military and denotes the difference between the general’s action plan and the top sergeant’s action plan. It is not about long-term vs short-term

8) Don’t Confuse Strategy with Management & Don’t Confuse Current Financial Results with Strategy

9) Strategy Foundry is a methodology to help a leadership team breakaway from treating strategy as goal setting. It helps identify key challenges, diagnose their structures, identify the crux, and work out how to address it. It is different from strategic planning or strategy workshops, where the outcome is essentially a long-term budget

Thanks for the recommendation Shiv Shivakumar

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