Quotes About Strategy

It was an interesting dilemma and with all such dilemmas an opportunity might emerge. 'How best to turn this setback into an advantage,' he wondered silently.

Trying to guess the enemy's next move is useful; trying to guess what they are thinking is pointless.

revenge is a dish best served cold. This is a mistake; you must never lose the heat of rage that drives you to revenge.

All of life is like this. You may attempt over and over again to accomplish a goal, but if you do so from an intellectual standpoint only, you'll rarely be successful.

One of Dalziel's dicta for police and public was, if you can't be honest you'd better be fucking clever.

Estamos en guerra. Mi táctica bélica puede resumirse en dos principios. Primero, yo sólo ataco cosas que triunfan, en ocasiones espero hasta que lo consiguen. Segundo, yo sólo ataco cuando no voy a encontrar aliados, cuando estoy solo, cuando me comprometo exclusivamente a mí mismo.

The secret? If we have a cardinal strategy that forms the bedrock for all our practices, it may be this: Ask why. Ask it all the time, ask it any day, every day, and always ask it three times in a row.

There are times when certain cards sit unclaimed in the common pile, when certain properties become available that will never be available again. A good businessman feels these moments like a fall in the barometric pressure. A great businessman is dumb enough to act on them even when he cannot afford to.

The best tycoons are like magicians: they know when to share information and when to withhold. - p141

For every move, there is a countermove. For every disaster, there is a recovery. He never lost faith in his own agency. With his fortune fast diminishing, it was time to act.

The best tycoons are like magicians; they know when to share information and when to withhold.

He described his grand strategy as indirection. If General Motors hired Joe Schmo to sell cars, Joe Schmo would give an interview to Road & Track, telling them the specs of the Thunderbird, engine size in cubic inches, zero-to-sixty, and so on. Given the same job, Bernays would lobby Congress for higher speed limits, making it more fun to own a Thunderbird. Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world more friendly to his product.

In the 1950s, a consortium of publishers—including Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster—concerned about a dip in numbers, hired Bernays. Did he go into schools and make the case for books? No, he talked to the architects and contractors who were designing the new suburban homes and convinced them a house is not modern if it does not include built-in bookshelves. Indirection.

Bernays set various goals: convince the American people of the Communist presence in Guatemala; convince members of Congress the issue is a winner; convince the CIA, which can actually do something on the ground, it's time to act. Bernays wouldn't make the world better for bananas, he would make the world better for American politicians, who would make the world better for the CIA, which would make the world better for bananas. Indirection.

For that matter, Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and was never at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies.

In poker the highest hand is a royal straight-flush in spades.

I have played the fox, now I must play the cat of the fable.

A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.

An ESS is stable, not because it is particularly good for the individuals participating in it, but simply because it is immune to treachery from within.

A further important point is that Maynard Smith was seeking the 'best' strategy in only a special sense. In fact he was seeking an 'evolutionarily stable strategy' or ESS.

The ESS has been rigorously defined (Maynard Smith 1974), but it can be crudely encapsulated as a strategy that is successful when competing with copies of itself.

If a program or strategy is successful, this means that copies of it will tend to become more numerous in the population of programs and will ultimately become almost universal. It will therefore come to be surrounded by copies of itself. If it is to remain universal, therefore, it must be successful when competing against copies of itself, successful compared with rare different strategies that might arise by mutation or invasion.

A mutant individual who was prepared to go on just a little bit longer would always win. So the strategy of maintaining a fixed bidding limit is unstable.

evolutionarily stable strategy, an idea that he traces back to W. D. Hamilton and R. H. MacArthur. A 'strategy' is a pre-programmed behavioural policy. An example of a strategy is: 'Attack opponent; if he flees pursue him; if he retaliates run away.