THE CRUX

The new book from Richard Rumelt, one of the world's most influential thinkers on strategy and management, a breakthrough theory for creating dynamic strategies that attack critical challenges and overcome obstacles to success.

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. The Economist profiled him as one of twenty-five living persons who have had the most influence on management concepts and corporate practice. McKinsey Quarterly described him as being "strategy's strategist" and as "a giant in the field of strategy." Throughout his career he has defined the cutting edge of strategy, initiating the systematic economic study of strategy, developing the idea that companies that focus on core skills perform best, and that superior performance is not a matter of being in the right industry but comes from a firm's individual excellence. He is one of the founders of the resource-based view of strategy, a perspective that breaks with the market-power tradition, explaining performance in terms of unique specialized resources. Richard Rumelt received his doctoral degree from Harvard Business School, holds the Harry and Elsa Kunin Chair at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and is a consultant to small firms such as the Samuel Goldwyn Company and giants such as Shell International, as well as to organizations in the educational and not-for-profit worlds.