An incisive discussion on Rumelt’s The Crux with three distinguished strategists—Ramaprasad, Gen Arun, and Shobhana Ravi.
Sreenivassan Ramaprasad
Founder and Enabler, Saamartya
Good evening. When I chose this book, I had just finished a couple of sessions with corporates on strategic thinking — one with an IT company, one with a manufacturing company — and it became clear that strategy is probably the most overused, misused and least understood word in management today. So I went looking for the right book on the subject, and found The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists by Richard Rumelt. It runs to about three hundred pages across five parts, and I won’t pretend it’s an easy read — getting through it was, in its own way, a crux for me.
Rumelt opens with a question every leader eventually faces: when you’re surrounded by problems, ambitions and demands, how do you decide what truly deserves your attention? He borrows the answer from rock climbing. Climbers call a difficult route a problem, and the hardest single move on that route the crux. Strength and ambition matter, but they aren’t enough — the climber has to understand that one difficulty, find a way through it, and concentrate effort exactly there. That, he argues, is the essence of strategy too.
Four ideas run through the book. First, strategy should begin with challenges, not goals — statements like “become the market leader” or “double our revenue” express ambition, but don’t tell you what’s blocking you or how you’ll get past it. Second is diagnosis: before choosing any action, you have to honestly understand why a situation is hard, which assumptions might be wrong, and whether you’re treating a symptom rather than the real problem. Third, the challenge you pick has to be addressable — important alone isn’t enough; you need the capability to actually move it. And fourth, once you’ve found your crux, every policy and resource in the organisation needs to pull in the same direction rather than compete with each other.
Rumelt also warns against what he calls “bright shiny distractions” — starting with vision statements, mistaking financial targets for strategy, or letting planning become an elaborate exercise that avoids the hard question. And he closes by describing strategy not as a one-time master plan but as a journey: solving one crux reveals the next, and leaders have to keep acting, learning and adapting.
My own takeaway is that leadership becomes strategic the moment it moves from aspiration to diagnosis, from a wish-list of priorities to one hard choice, and from scattered activity to coherent action. With that, I’ll hand over to my two panelists — one for whom strategy has been a way of life in uniform, and one who has lived it building IT and HR transformation in the corporate world.
Lt Gen A Arun (Retd)
Leadership Strategist | Former Senior Indian Army Officer | Keynote Speaker
Good evening, and Jai Hind. Does every leader have to be strategic? No. There are outstanding leaders who operate brilliantly at the front end, and strategy isn’t compulsory for everybody.
I’ll start with Rumelt’s mountaineering image, because I want to push back on it a little. When you’re climbing a rock face, you see one extension ahead, find your grip, climb it, and only then does the rest of the cliff come into view. That, to me, is tactical — the salesman, the soldier, the scientist, the teacher all work at that level. Strategy is deciding which mountain to climb next. I was Chief of Strategy for the Indian Army — my job was to look twenty-five years ahead, which this book would say isn’t even possible. A submarine takes decades to build; a major procurement can take seven or eight years just to move through approvals before a ten-year delivery clock even starts. So my challenge was to find, today, the capability the country will need a quarter-century from now. That’s why not everyone is, or needs to be, a strategist — those doing day-to-day operational work must stay there, and those meant for strategy must be left alone to do it. When Galwan happened, I never once walked into the operations room — that wasn’t my job.
What the book does very well is reframe strategy as focused problem-solving, and its treatment of diagnosis is outstanding — cutting through corporate rhetoric and isolating real strategic choices from empty statements about vision and mission. I also liked the idea of the “foundry,” the space where a strategist has to hear every voice in the room honestly before deciding, rather than simply announcing what the loudest voice wants to hear.
Where I part ways with Rumelt: there’s no quantitative or economic model here, only anecdote-driven case studies written after the outcome was already known — so when exactly was each crux actually identified? The definition of “crux” is entirely subjective, and the book leans heavily on intuition, when in my experience finding the real crux is a research-driven, conversational process, not a flash of genius. The case studies also favour survivors — for every Netflix there was a Blockbuster, for every Samsung a Nokia — and the book doesn’t explain what separated a crux correctly identified from one missed entirely. And across three hundred and thirty-four pages, there isn’t a single Indian example, even though strategic thought is hardly a Western invention — the Fibonacci sequence has sat inside the rhythm cycles of Bharatanatyam for centuries; we simply never gave it that name.
Must you read this book? Five hundred percent yes — the strong parts are genuinely strong. Just read it with your own biases intact, the way I’ve read it with mine.
Ms Shobhana Ravi
President – InfoTech, Innovation & Learning, TAFE Ltd
Good evening, everyone. After that, I honestly don’t think I have much left to add — he’s summarised the book beautifully, flaws and all.
I’ll admit fitting three hundred pages alongside my day job was a struggle, and I ended up listening to it as an audiobook on a long drive rather than reading it cover to cover, so I won’t claim his thoroughness. I’ve spent years anchoring strategic planning and deployment using both European and Japanese models, so my first reaction was that much of this already exists elsewhere — frameworks, tools, all of it. What I did find genuinely useful is Rumelt’s distinction between what is critical and what is addressable; prioritising by impact and feasibility is something we already practice at TAFE, where we build tractors for the Indian and international agri markets, but naming addressability as its own criterion was a fresh lens for me.
What stayed with me most, though, was more personal. I currently lead IT, digital and AI transformation, and there have been nights I’ve lost sleep feeling completely unequipped for what I’m doing. Years ago a consultant once told me that losing sleep over feeling unprepared meant I was incompetent — and that comment stayed with me far longer than it should have. Reading this book, I found Rumelt saying almost the opposite: that discomfort is normal for anyone doing genuinely new work, and you shouldn’t be uncomfortable about being uncomfortable. For someone building teams and choosing people by judgment rather than a scientific process — and living with the discomfort, even the office politics, that comes with that — the reassurance mattered.
The other idea I’ll hold on to is about identifying the real challenge. We often reach for the easiest answer when the harder truth is sitting just outside our field of view. Learning to see what we’re not yet seeing is something every leader has to keep working on — it doesn’t arrive on its own.
