Quotes About Strategy

Planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs. There is no work that can be performed effectively unless it contains elements of both. One

Still, entrepreneurial strategy remains the decision-making area of entrepreneurship and therefore the risk-taking one. It is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgement.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.

Concept of the Corporation.

Note that the question is not "What do I want to do?" Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success.

Effective executives build on strengths

Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.

Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions

Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events.

Write an Action Plan

Gerenciar é fazer as coisas do jeito certo; liderar é fazer as coisas certas.

These apparently low-level decisions are extremely important in a knowledge-based organization.

The worst kind of replacement planning is the search for a "crown prince." A crown prince either has a legal right to succeed; or else nomination is likely to destroy him. No matter how carefully concealed, picking a crown prince is an overt act which the whole organization very rapidly perceives. And then all the other possible contenders unite against the crown prince and work to bring him down—and they usually succeed.

But it is meaningless to speak of short-range and long-range plans. There are plans that lead to action today—and they are true plans, true strategic decisions. And there are plans that talk about action tomorrow—they are dreams, if not pretexts for nonthinking, nonplanning, nondoing. The

There are a number of tasks which are top-management tasks, not because top management is the "top"—that is, because it has the legal authority or the power—but because they are tasks that can be discharged only by people who are capable of seeing the whole business and of making decisions with respect to the whole business.

The aim of strategic planning is action now.

But,' the chairman continued, 'in this kind of store, it is normal and healthy for fashion to produce seventy per cent of sales. Appliance sales have grown so fast that they now account for three-fifths. And that's abnormal. We've tried everything we know to make fashion grow to restore the normal ratio, but nothing works. The only thing left now is to push appliance sales down to where they should be.

The question to ask is not "What is top management?" The question is "What are the specific things to be done in this business which are of crucial importance to the success and survival of the business and which can be done only by top management?

In 1845 — she (Elizabeth Barrett) was almost forty — she began corresponding with Robert Browning, and noted that what most people call love is really a kind of warfare, with one side enjoying all the strategic advantages. Again and again one sees the growth of power on one side and the struggle against it, by means legal & illegal on the other. The best counterattack that women can mount is guerrilla warfare.

Science works by taking theoretical ideas and trying to find ways to expose them to observation. The scientific strategy is to construe ideas, to embed them in surrounding conceptual frameworks, and to develop them, in such a way that this exposure is possible even in the case of the most general and ambitious hypotheses about the universe.

The last two forms of feedback, "You tried really hard" and "You found a good way to do it; could you think of other ways that would also work?" focus on different aspects of the process—effort and strategy—and not on the person.

First, it gets children into the habit of explaining successes and failures in terms of strategy use.

By the spring of 1918 when the German divisions had transferred from the Eastern Front to the Western Front, they were able to deploy some 192 divisions opposing only 156 Allied divisions. Numerically the situation had never been more promising for the Germans, but the American forces were gathering and casting a long shadow across German plans.

I was fighting fire with fire, and I responded to propaganda with more of the same.