A short talk by Cameron Herold arguing that businesses should identify and obsess over a single, highest-leverage problem (the "crux")—solve it and the company accelerates. He uses rock-climbing’s "crux" as a metaphor, gives recruiting as a current example (65 openings, 25 pivotal hires), and cites a COO Alliance case where changing the delivery model drove membership growth.
Chapters
So I just got off a coaching call with a CEO that I coach and a CEO that I coach and we just spent 90 minutes on one issue. And I won't stop talking about this one issue with them now until we solve it. It's huge. Huge, Huge, huge. So if you think about your company, do you really sit down with your leadership team and figure out what the crux is to the problem, what your biggest opportunity is to your problem? So in rock climbing, the crux of a, of a rock climb, if you think about Alex, who did the movie Free Solo when he climbed up El Capitan, there's one move on that entire route and it takes, you know, hours to go up that route and there's one single move and that move is what, what, what classifies that climb at a certain level. So let's say that all the moves on a route are like 5 11, 5 12, 5 13, 5 11. And there's one, one move and it's a 514C. That route is now called the 514C. It's the crux, that one single move. And if you solve that one move, you can nail the whole climb. Well, in business it's about solving that one key thing, right? When you solve that one key thing and it can change over time, but, but if you have that one key thing solved, everything can go faster. So I wanted them to understand what their one key thing was, was right now. We kept talking about it and we realized it's recruiting. Right Now. They have 65 positions open and they have 25 positions that would be completely game changing if they got those 25 positions solved. They have a person who's running HR for them and they're good at running HR and they have a couple people doing recruiting who are kind of average at recruiting, but they haven't been been filling the roles, which said to me, well, the recruiters aren't very good at recruiters. Turns out they're really not even recruiters. And the person running HR has never done recruiting. They've always been on the HR side and they're a couple hundred person company and they've got all the HR stuff that they need. But it's kind of like having sales and marketing reporting to the same person. Just because you're good at sales doesn't mean you're good at marketing. You need to have someone who's good at sales, running sales, someone who's good at marketing, running marketing, and you need to be completely maniacal around that thing. So these guys are going to Stay completely maniacal around recruiting right now. They're going into a three day annual planning retreat this week. And I said there's nothing to talk about for the three days. It's recruiting, it's recruiting bonuses, it's our pay structures, it's our job postings, it's working with the recruiting agencies we've got. It is, you know, you know, all guns blazing around recruiting and really starting to bring in the talent into the company. Because if you solve that, the 25 kind of game changing roles, the company goes to the moon. So just think about your business and, and what you're focusing on right now. Is your leadership team really obsessed, obsessed with that one core thing? Are you just all over the place? Are you really dispersed in your focus and what could that one game changing be thing for you? You know, if I think about the COO alliance as an example, we've signed 42 new members in the last 60 days because we changed one part of the model. Instead of having a model where people had to travel for all of our events, it's now a pure online model. We have 12 monthly events that are three hours each online. The rate now to be a member is only 7, 500. It used to be 20,000 plus travel, so it used to be like 28,000 a year. Now it's 7, 500. We changed the core model and everything got easy. So figuring out that one core part of your business and obsessing about that and keeping people obsessed about that until you get it fixed will really kind of propel the company forward. So think about what yours is in your business and are you really obsessed about that? Tom Peters, when he wrote in search of excellence 30 years ago, said that the only people who get things done are monomaniacs with a mission. And we really need to be monomaniacal inside of our businesses.
