Quotes About Strategy

When a change management fails, leadership change is brought in. A leadership change will always bring in change management

Conflict manipulation is the favored strategy of people who incessantly worry about failure, of managers who excel at motivational chats that point out the highly unpleasant consequences if the company's goals are not achieved, and of social movements that attempt to mobilize people through fear.

If managers focus only on short-term results, they are often justified in continuing to intervene to sustain results.

Shop early for the best, we had often been told, and wait until just before the market closes for the cheapest.

See, squire," he said to the wide-eyed hotel manager, "our boss tells us we don't want a lot of fuss about this. None of this evacuating the area bollocks you see on telly. We go in, we disarm him nice and quiet, then bob's your uncle, we're out of your hair for good. Okay? No problems for us and no bad publicity for the hotel.

Machiavelli declared that it was better to be feared than loved as a leader, but you did not want to be hated. Hatred led to conspiracy. And conspiracy, he warned, could bring down governments.

Politicians spend so much time raising money because that is how you win elections.

Raising money is what helps an ambitious member of the House rise in the ranks far more than ideas or competence.

Unlike most CEOs, when trying something new, Jeff Bezos and his senior team (known as the S Team) don't try to develop elaborate financial projections or return on investment calculations. "You can't put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product," Bezos will say.

At the core of this experimental approach, little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable.

Chris Rock, the Google founders, and Jeff Bezos and his team are examples of people who approach problems in a nonlinear manner using little bets, what University of Chicago economist David Galenson has dubbed "experimental innovators.

When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not.

According to Weick, "a series of wins at small but significant tasks … reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance.

Harvard Business Review that he said reminded him of me. The article—"Parables of Leadership" by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne—was composed of a series of ancient parables that focused on what the authors called "the unseen space of leadership.

I've taken a different tack. After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became.

Every now and then, to keep the players focused, he would ask them to nod their heads if they heard the word "defense...

Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don't have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won't pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.

Before each series I spent a lot of time visualizing new ways to neutralize our next opponent's attack.

I've always been interested in getting players to think for themselves so that they can make difficult decisions in the heat of battle.

triangle offense, that aligned perfectly with the values of selflessness and mindful awareness I'd been studying in Zen Buddhism.

From the point of view of high generalship those holding attacks had served their purpose pretty well. From the point of view of mother's sons they had been a bloody shambles without any gain. The point of view depends on the angle of vision.

And what good was a political strategist who couldn't look ahead to his own death? Without that he would have been merely another Hitler, who didn't want his country to survive him.

This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you; we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic. Every secret service knows this paradox.

I'm a tin princess. Like chess: I come all the way across the board and turned into a queen, Still only tin, though.