Quotes About Strategy

He patted the stock of Reel's rifle. "We don't do it with this. We do it by raising dark money to fund policies and candidates that we like. We even help write legislation.

It was Churchill himself who described Sir John Jellicoe, the commander-in-chief, as "the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon".

The best means to an end are not always those that appear most direct.

In many companies, operations and strategy exist on different planes. Planning presentations take place in July, while operational budgets are formulated six months later, at year's end.

Most companies have succession plans for their leadership ranks, but it devolves into a rote exercise, and the organization lacks a clear sense of who will fill key roles in case of departure. It's another instance of what I call "compliance with words rather than compliance with intent.

If you want to perform well over both the short and long term, pay close attention to executive leadership in general. As much as you might invest in areas like culture, process transformation, and M&A, you'll only make progress if you have talented senior leaders who are both committed to the company's strategies and capable of executing on them. Having the right number of those leaders matters too.

As you tighten up R&D, you'll be in a stronger position to grow sales even more by expanding geographically. When I joined Honeywell, three-quarters of global GDP occurred outside of the United States, but only 40 percent of our sales originated there. That thirty-five-point gap spelled opportunity.

Joseph L. Bower's The CEO Within, which argued for choosing leaders inside the company to serve as CEO. According to Bower, you wanted a special kind of insider: someone who intimately understood the company and its operations, but who could also maintain a sense of distance and understand what about the company needed to change—an outsider's perspective from someone on the inside.

While at General Electric, I'd noticed firsthand what a big difference it made to be in a good industry. When I ran General Electric's major appliance business, we had a great position but were in a crummy, highly competitive, low-growth industry. No matter how hard we worked, we stood little chance of excelling—the pressure on prices was just too intense. It was far easier, I found, to make progress with a business that occupied a bad position in a good industry.

Regarding a prospective company's position in its industry, think hard about whether you might roll up multiple players in a fragmented industry to create a juggernaut. When we entered the gas detection business, there were no big players, but over an eight-year period we were able to acquire several companies, roll them up into a single Honeywell business, and become number one in the industry.

If you have a great strategy but overpay for a company, someone else's shareholders will see the benefits of your strategy, not yours.

In truth, mobilizing people is only about 5 percent of the leader's job. The best leaders dedicate almost all their time to the latter two elements: making great decisions and executing consistently with those decisions.

In challenging other leaders intellectually, I strove specifically to push them beyond the incrementalism that usually exists inside organizations—the tendency to consider the short-term implications of a decision exclusively and to ignore the long term.

While reading a book about the construction of the Panama Canal, I came across an anecdote about the project's chief engineer, whose math teacher used to say, "If you have five minutes to solve a problem, use the first three to figure out how you're going to do it.

Not only did I spend time in advance of meetings generating some key questions for teams

Pretending to others that your opponents are stupid may sometimes be a sensible tactic. Believing that they are is usually a serious mistake.

Impatience is a poor substitute for a well-considered plan.

Let's kill the big one with the red whiskers then, another suggested. He looks like he might be troublesome, and he's probably too stupid to know anything useful. I want that one, Barak whispered.

You're going to keep making these mistakes as long as you keep carrying your brain in the same scabbard with your sword, Lelldorin.

When father uses the word 'politics' he's talking about relations between nations. When I use the word, though, I'm talking about the various subtle ways a woman can get men to do what she wants them to do.

Any fool can raise an army, but you start running into trouble around suppertime.

No matter how professional soldiers might be, an avoided battle was always good news.

We was doing a lot of what our officers called "maneuvering"—which is officer talk for running

To raise it all to artistry, Barak and Greldik ordered their men to lounge indolently on the decks of their ships, drinking ale and playing dice.