The Crux How Leaders Become Strategists

Richard Rumelt’s brilliant and pragmatic book radically changes the way leaders think about and do the most important part of their job: creating a strategy. All too often, leaders neither understand what strategy actually is nor how to create one, mistaking financial targets (“grow by 15 percent annually”) and aspirational goals (“we will produce market-leading products”) as strategy.
 
Leaders become strategists when they pinpoint the crux of the vital, basic, pivotal challenges they face - the problems that threaten future success and the dramatic opportunities for growth whose shape may be elusive and difficult to grasp - and then take powerful, coherent, decisive  action to make progress toward building a better future
 
Through vivid storytelling—ranging from how Elon Musk found the crux that propelled the success of Space X to how the American military came to grips with the weaknesses of its battle strategy—Rumelt reframes how we think about strategy..
 
Strategy is an ongoing journey, not a once-a-year exercise done and then forgotten. Leaders who are strategists have an ever-present alertness to rapidly evolving business, economic, and institutional challenges that threaten future success, fundamental values, even the existence of the organization. Finding the crux is the essential skill of the strategist, especially when challenging problems and opportunities defy easy solution and the forces at work are unclear.

Richard P. Rumelt is one of the world’s most influential thinkers on strategy and management. McKinsey Quarterly described him as “strategy’s strategist” and “a giant in the field of strategy”. He is the author of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters,” reviewed by the Financial Times as “the most interesting business book of 2011” and by Strategy + Business as “the year’s best and most original addition to the strategy bookshelf." Dr. Rumelt received his doctoral degree from Harvard Business School and is the Harry and Elise Kunin Chair emeritus at the UCLA Anderson School of Management