The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists

The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists is Richard P. Rumelt’s follow-up to Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. In this book, Rumelt talks about how to identify the crux of a project: the challenge in a project that is simultaneously the most difficult and promises the most progress. Rumelt teaches that one can master the art of strategy by identifying the crux of a challenge and taking decisive action related to that crux.

While The Crux does contain some useful case studies on identifying the hardest part of a project and powering through it, many of these studies are based on war, or white men, making it seems that not much effort was made to include examples of strategy successes by women or People of Color. In 2022, much more effort needs to be made to include perspectives that are representative of the population as a whole, and this book falls short in that area.

Still, identifying the crux of a matter is an important skill for any leader to have in order to move beyond leadership to strategy. This book provides enough of a framework to be helpful in that regard.