Review of ‘The Crux’
Richard Rumelt, along with Roger Martin, is one of the leading academic-practitioner strategists in the world today, measured in terms of popularity with students and strategy professionals. He has been dubbed “the strategist’s strategist” by McKinsey.
Aside from the quality of his writing, what makes Rumelt so popular is the elegant simplicity of his view of strategy.
Rumelt sees strategy as a set of actions to solve a meaningful problem, what he calls ‘the crux’ of any particular challenge or opportunity. A strategy requires a diagnosis of the crux, an approach to solving it, and a specific set of actions to implement it.
In Rumelts’ view, frameworks and tools of strategic analysis may help with problem characterisation, but they don’t produce the strategy itself. That is a creative act, akin to design, performed by those closest to the problem, generated from reflection and dialogue.
In his latest book, ‘The Crux’, Rumelt describes the strategy formulation approach he uses with clients, officially trademarked as a “Strategy Foundry”, in which he prepares and then facilitates a 3-day strategy discovery process with small groups of senior executives.
In one sense, Rumelt’s opinions and approach to strategy are affirmation for practicing strategists: at last someone is describing how strategy really happens, rather than all the theories and jargon that typically come with the subject.
However, in another sense, it is sobering to conclude that, after fifty plus years of strategy as a discipline, that it comes down to this: a group of people sitting around talking about a problem and defining some actions to address it. The strategy foundry sounds a little like a papal enclave waiting on the white smoke to arise. Not very structured, diverse, or inclusive.
Another concern is whether this is an adequate approach to strategy for large organisations. Surely there must be more than one problem — and therefore multiple ‘cruxes’ and strategies — in these cases? Group businesses often produce framework strategies that provide direction and parameters for individual business unit strategy and are useful for ‘cascading’ business objectives and capital allocation. It seems pedantic not to describe these also as strategy, even though they are second order problem-solvers.
Overall, Rumelt’s emphasis on strategic thinking, questioning, dialogue and focus provides a welcome antidote to verbose methodological approaches to strategy that dominate most businesses today. However, the foundry approach is unlikely to catch on in business schools and boardrooms looking for data-based analysis as the foundation for strategy.
