The Crux Quotes

“The truth is that venture capital is invested not in plans but in the individuals who have proposed the venture and have committed themselves to running it.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“You will have a much harder time dealing with a gnarly challenge if you have not distilled it down to a crux. No one solves a problem they cannot comprehend and hold in their mind.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“I don’t actually know what I know until I work to write it down. The process of writing reveals contradictions, weak arguments, and places where more data is needed to back up an opinion. And it helps sort out the important from the less important”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“My strong advice for a company seeking profitable growth is to restrict your purposes to two: to acquire skills and technologies (including growing platforms) that are complementary to the existing strategy and that would be hard to create internally and to provide broader and stronger market access for the target’s products.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“The pop-psychology belief is that goals motivate. Stupid arbitrary goals don’t motivate achievement. They motivate cynicism and fabrication”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“Setting a specific metric is deciding what is important.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“Ted Berner asked me, “What is a good strategic goal?” The answer is that good strategic goals are an outcome of working the gnarly problem of strategy, not an antecedent. When organizational leaders face the issue of strategy, they are building a bridge between general desires and ambitions and the specifics of action in the here and now. If they do their job well, one outcome will be good strategic objectives.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“For the academics who currently populate top professional schools, design is a bit like shop class, akin to automobile repair or welding, and residing at a far remove from respectable activities like the mathematical modeling of stochastic processes and the statistical analysis of selection bias.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“Too many people start with goals and other visions of a desired end state. Start with the challenge, and diagnose its structure and the forces at work. Once you do that, your sense of purpose and the actions you consider will change. In that diagnosis, find the crux. That is the most critical part of the challenge that you can actually expect to solve. Don’t pick a challenge you cannot yet deal with—attack the crux of the situation, build momentum, and then reexamine your position and its possibilities.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“The art of strategy is not finding your one true goal and passionately pursuing it with all your heart and soul in everything you do—that is a type of mental illness called monomania. The art of strategy is not setting higher and higher performance goals for people and using charisma, carrots, and sticks to push them toward attaining those goals—that presumes that someone somewhere knows how to find a way through the thicket of problems the organization actually faces.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

“a good goal, or good objective, flows out of a process of problem solving. A good objective has the form of a task—set up operations in Australia, work with a particular customer to solve a product quality problem, create a breakaway team to focus on developing a better waterproof coating, and so on. Starting with unsupported goals—like gain market share—lacks entrepreneurial insight and tries to get performance by flogging the system.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists