Quotes About Strategy

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

A good part of the work of managing involves doing what specialists do, but in particular ways that make use of the manager's special contacts, status, and information.

Consistency: The strategy must not present mutually inconsistent goals and policies. Consonance: The strategy must represent an adaptive response to the external environment and to the critical changes occurring within it. Advantage: The strategy must provide for the creation and/or maintenance of a competitive advantage in the selected area of activity. Feasibility: The strategy must neither overtax available resources nor create unsolvable subproblems.

At its simplest, the design school proposes a model of strategy making that seeks to attain a match, or fit, between internal capabilities and external possibilities.

To succeed, managers have to become proficient at their superficiality.

To many of these writers, planning became not just an approach to strategy formation but a virtual religion to be promulgated with the fervor of missionaries.

from Inkpen and Choudhury, 1995:313-323) … Strategy absence need not be associated with organizational failure…. Deliberate building in of strategy absence may promote flexibility in an organization…. Organizations with tight controls, high reliance on formalized procedures, and a passion for consistency may lose the ability to experiment and innovate.

Much information important for strategy making never does become hard fact. The expression on a customer's face, the mood in the factory, the tone of voice of a government official, all of this can be information for the manager but not for the formal system.

Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed To have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads.

Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to Moscow because he wished to and because he was very clever and a genius

Well, so you're pleased with your day. And so am I. First, I solved two chess problems, one of them a very nice one — it opens with a pawn. I'll show you.

The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned militarist criticizes them with looks of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people fill whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won.

This praise of his strategic abilities was especially pleasing to [Tsar] Nicholas, because, though he was proud of his strategic abilities, at the bottom of his heart he was aware that he had none. And now he wanted to to hear more detailed praise of himself.

knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it in as far as that was in his power.

He who wants results must allow for the means.

in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can never be known to anyone.

Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

It is only possible to capture prisoners if they agree to be captured, just as it is only possible to catch a swallow if it settles on one's hand. Men can only be taken prisoners if they surrender according to the rules of strategy and tactics, as the Germans did.

But a commander in chief, especially at a difficult moment, has always before him not one proposal but dozens simultaneously. And all these proposals, based on strategics and tactics,