Quotes About Strategy

Just remember, there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything and the wrong way is to keep trying to make everybody else do it the right way.

You know, we've got to do it someday... throw away all the guns and invite all the jokers from the North and the South in here to a cocktail party... last man standing on his feet at the end wins the war.

An adaptive agent is constantly playing a game with its environment. What exactly does that mean? Distilled to the essence, what actually has to happen for game-playing agents to survive and prosper? Two things, Holland decided: prediction and feedback.

It's also the principle that lies behind all of Oriental martial arts. You don't try to stop your opponent, you let him come at you-and then give him a tap in just the right direction as he rushes by. The idea is to observe, to act courageously, and to pick your timing extremely well.

In outline, it is easy to see how a spatial game could work along the same lines as the cellular automata. The game players are arranged on a chessboardlike array (it can be in three dimensions, of course, or even more). During each round, the player on a given square plays the game with its neighbors. After this, each square is occupied by its original owner or by one of the eight neighbors, depending on who won that round—in other words, who got the biggest payoff.

Beijing has organised for itself the best of all three worlds: First World armed power, Second World economic strength and Third World handouts.

The plan was typical of the way the German officer corps had come to see strategic problems in a vacuum, entirely from their narrow viewpoint, and without recourse to the nuances of diplomacy or the needs of politics.

German aggression tended to backfire,

Politicians are fools and the games they play are fools games.

UNDERLYING NEED "COPING" MECHANISM

The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?" These suicidal charges worked occasionally only because Stalin did not care how many of his own soldiers died.

In business, real discipline comes in saying no to the wrong opportunities." —Jim Collins

Change is the key that unlocks the door to growth and excitement in any organization. The leader's ability to inspire a culture of change can make or break their success. Tomorrow comes at us with lightning speed, and our competitive advantage is a fleeting thing. Bill Gates puts it this way: "In three years, every product my company makes will be obsolete. The only question is whether we will make them obsolete or somebody else will.

If your company mission is to climb a tree, which would you rather do: hire a squirrel or train a horse?

A spoonful of sugar can be as helpful in dealing with foreign diplomats as it is in child psychology, for these are not unrelated fields.

If diplomacy is the art of persuading others to act as we would wish, effective foreign policy requires that we comprehend why others act as they do

The purpose of foreign policy is to influence the policies and actions of other nations in a way that serves your interests and values. The tools available include everything from kind words to cruise missiles. Mixing them properly and with sufficient patience is the art of diplomacy.

the conservatives saw the Fascist leader as someone they could hide behind, manipulate, and, when convenient, replace.

I TELL MY STUDENTS THAT THE FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE OF FOREIGN policy is elementary: to convince other countries to do what we would like them to do.

MUSSOLINI OBSERVED THAT IN SEEKING TO ACCUMULATE POWER, it is wise to do so in the manner of one plucking a chicken—feather by feather—so each squawk is heard apart from every other and the whole process is kept as muted as possible.

The inherent tensions between the White House and the press should not worry a president who is disciplined about observing certain elementary tactics of survival. Take responsibility, admit mistakes, put out bad news quickly, and acknowledge inconsistencies before others point them out.

A major study conducted by IBM found that the single most sought after trait in CEOs is creativity.

I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep? The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: "What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?" He'd smiled in the firelight. "That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.

Success in such a war as this comes only through men sewn to a single purpose, funnelled to a single spear thrust rather than a thousand needle-pricks.