“another more recent called the Crux”
← All resourcesbook
The Crux
By Richard Rumelt
2 recommend/use · 3 sourced episodes
Every sourced reference
Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.
“he's also the author author of The Crux his most recent book”
RecommendsThe engineering mindset
“I think the Crux also also quite good but but maybe I would read that one second”
Related frameworks
Communication6 steps
Energy-Aligned Writing
Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.
Read →
Strategy3 steps
Focusing Power on an Addressable Target
Strategy works only when you concentrate a genuine source of power on a target that can actually be moved.
Read →
Strategy5 steps
Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better
Only a fundamentally different experience gets customers to tell their friends about it.
Read →
Innovation5 steps
Hypothesis-First Customer Discovery
Bring a crisp hypothesis to the interview — then be its judge, not its lawyer.
Read →
Productivity5 steps
Imperfect Metrics as Education
Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.
Read →
Strategy4 steps
Spotting Bad Strategy
Four tells that a 'strategy' is actually empty: no diagnosis, goals-as-strategy, fluff, and incoherent actions.
Read →
Strategy5 steps
Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis
Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.
Read →
Strategy4 steps
The Action Agenda (Ambition-Filter Method)
Stop writing a 'strategy.' Filter your ambitions down to one important, addressable challenge and act.
Read →
Strategy5 steps
The Boring Engineering Strategy
Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.
Read →
Strategy6 steps
The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test
A strategy is not an aspiration — it names a specific customer, pain, solution and advantage in one sentence.
Read →
Innovation3 steps
The Crux: Insight Through Immersion
Find the single hardest solvable part of the problem, immerse in it, and let insight emerge.
Read →
Leadership4 steps
The Foundry: Facilitating a Group to One Action Agenda
Put the leader plus 7-8 people in a room, surface 25 problems, then focus on the one or two addressable ones.
Read →
Leadership4 steps
The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test
Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.
Read →
Strategy3 steps
The Kernel of Good Strategy
Every real strategy has three parts: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.
Read →
Leadership5 steps
The Owner-Not-Renter Veto
How a PM says 'not yet' to an executive chain that desperately wants to scale.
Read →
Innovation6 steps
The Sean Ellis Scale Gate
Never scale a product until a calibrated share of users would be 'very disappointed' without it.
Read →
Leadership5 steps
The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair
Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.
Read →
Entrepreneurship3 steps
The Value Deny: Finding Opportunity in What You Can't Buy
List what you should be able to buy but can't, or how a familiar product ought to work but doesn't.
Read →
People in these episodes
Related resources
- Accelerate
- Airbnb
- Amazon
- Amazon Web Services
- Amazon Working Backwards press release
- An Elegant Puzzle
- Apple
- Apple Podcasts
- Bing
- Calm
- Carta
- Coinbase
- CommandBar
- Don't Think of an Elephant!
- DORA
- DoubleClick
- DX
- From Third World to First
- Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
- Google Cloud
- Google Reader
- Google Search
- Greenhouse
- Harvard Business School
- How Big Things Get Done
- IBM
- Intel
- Java
- Lenny's Podcast
- Lex Fridman Podcast
- Lomi
- Lost
- Medium
- Mercury
- Microsoft
- Microsoft Azure
- Miro
- MIT
- Net Promoter Score
- Netflix
- Nubank
- OneSchema
- Only the Paranoid Survive
- Playing to Win
- Python
- Robinhood
- Ruby
- Sean Ellis Test
- Seven Powers
- Slack
- SPACE
- SpaceX
- Spotify
- Stripe
- Substack
- Swiffer
- Technology Strategy Patterns
- The Crux Book website
- The Phoenix Project
- The Value Flywheel Effect
- The Wall Street Journal
- Top Chef
- Uber
- Vanta
- WorkOS
- Yellowstone
- YouTube
- Zanzibar
Spot an error or want this page removed? Request a correction or removal.