Quotes from Stephen Bungay

If…there is a conflict between structure and strategy, the structure will win.

Do not try to predict the effects your actions will have, because you can't. Instead, encourage people to adapt their actions to realize the overall intention as they observe what is actually happening. Give them boundaries which are broad enough to take decisions for themselves and act on them.

What matters about creating alignment around a strategy is not the volume of communication, but its quality and precision.

Having worked out what matters most now, pass the message on to others and give them responsibility for carrying out their part in the plan. Keep it simple. Don't tell people what to do and how to do it. Instead, be as clear as you can about your intentions. Say what you want people to achieve and, above all, tell them why. Then ask them to tell you what they are going to do as a result.

What cannot be made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.

If company objectives are in conflict with personal ones, only one of them will win. Either the employees leave the company (as regularly happens in the most obvious form of conflict – forced redundancy) or the strategy will be sabotaged, consciously or unconsciously.

Strategy is about fighting the right battles, the important ones you are likely to win. Operations are about winning them.

Understanding gets compliance. Only belief gets commitment.

If Clausewitz is right, no one should develop a strategy without taking into account the effects of organizational friction. Yet we continue to be surprised and frustrated when it manifests itself. We tend to think everything has gone wrong when in fact everything has gone normally.

And even if we make good plans based on the best information available at the time and people do exactly what we plan, the effects of our actions may not be the ones we wanted because the environment is nonlinear and hence is fundamentally unpredictable. As time passes the situation will change, chance events will occur, other agents such as customers or competitors will take actions of their own, and we will find that what we do is only one factor among several which create a new situation.

A full and painstaking account of the day's fighting, from which this summary is largely derived, is given by Alfred Price in the work which gave this day its name. First published in 1979, it remains one of the best books yet written about the Battle of Britain.

Kanalkampfführer' – Channel Battle Leader.

Budgets were originally designed as control mechanisms. As such they are traps …

The trouble is that organizations like processes. They are warm, familiar things and can be rolled out fairly easily. It is therefore tempting to understand strategy execution as a process, distribute the forms, get everyone to fill them in, and relax. The result will be resentment, rigidity, and stagnation.

We are extraordinarily reluctant to admit that luck plays a part in business success.

Nature programmed us to think for ourselves, take risks, and seize unexpected opportunities. This in turn suggests that if an organization wants to encourage such behavior, the most important thing it can do is to identify and stop doing whatever is currently inhibiting it. To put it bluntly, it should get off people's backs.

organizations are made up of people. If this should seem obvious, the implications of acknowledging it are not.

Ohno is credited with the saying that "having no problems is the biggest problem of all." The result is the most productive automotive manufacturing system in the world today, which is sustaining its lead despite every attempt by its rivals to copy it. It has its origins in the need to overcome a constraint.

Combat is an interaction between human organisations. It is adversarial, highly dynamic, complex and lethal. It is grounded in individual and collective human behaviour, and conducted between organisations that are themselves complex. It is not determined, hence uncertain, and evolutionary. Critically, and to an extent in a way which we currently overlook, combat is fundamentally a human activity.12

There was a history of entrepreneurialism, but it was getting them nowhere. In fact, it was making things worse. They needed to leverage their scale globally, but as long as country managers were calling the shots and demanding scarce technical resources from the center to fix trivial local problems, the fundamental need for a new technology platform could never be addressed. To hell with entrepreneurialism; it was just an excuse for selfishness and waste.

This was enacted on the 27th, with the appointment of 'Onkel' Theo Osterkamp as 'Jagdfliegerführer 2', in charge of the fighter forces of Airfleet 2, most of which arrived at the Pas-de-Calais in the last week of July, and Werner Junck as his opposite number at Airfleet 3. Acronyms being de rigueur in the Luftwaffe, Osterkamp was actually known as 'Jafü 2'.

response entirely off its own bat.29 When asked about an official reply, Churchill responded that he had no intention of replying to Hitler himself, as he was not on speaking terms with him.

In a matrix structure of the kind prevalent today, thinking two levels up also has the benefit of helping to resolve the dilemmas the matrix naturally creates. The "next level up" may well be ambiguous. Two bosses might point in different directions. Understanding the level above them generally resolves the issue and allows action.

Kanal' means 'sewer' as well as 'channel'. 'Kanakafü' has echoes of 'Kacke', a baby word for faeces.