Quotes About Strategy

Scissors. He'd pulled a credit card and a pair of scissors from the drawer. Which meant he could either bribe or stab his adversary. Or he could go into a frenzy and cut up Jill's credit card. That would confuse 'em.

You pitch outside, you throw inside," he liked to say.

There is no shame in strategic retreat if it lets you remain strong enough to go after the enemy later.

Never trust a poker player.

The difference between a good business and a bad business is that good businesses throw up one easy decision after another. The bad businesses throw up painful decisions time after time.

The investment game always involves considering both quality and price, and the trick is to get more quality than you pay for in price. It's just that simple.

The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much. You're going to fail through lack of specialization.1 Charlie Munger

The next level. As though dating were a computer game.

Follow sound business trends, not fashion trends.

Everything FDR did was deliberate, particularly in politics. The leaders admired him, but they didn't trust him. They viewed him as "warm-hearted in everything but politics and there he was cold-blooded

Like Alexander the Great and Caesar, I'm out to conquer the world. But first I have to stop at Walmart and pick up some supplies.

Every API writer needs to have an evolution plan; that is, to know on a strategic level what will happen to the API in future releases.

The codebreakers had known for days, if not weeks, that a large Japanese attack was coming. William and the rest of his team had seen the MAGIC intercepts. It was obvious from MAGIC that Japan had been poised to strike; the only mystery was where. What surprised William on December 7 was not the attack itself but the location. He thought it would happen in Manila, not Pearl Harbor.

A business without a path to profit isn't a business, it's a hobby.

Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it's almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.

There's nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.

We don't throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three

Companies that live in such a zero-sum world don't "earn market share" from a competitor, they "conquer the market." They don't just serve their customers, they "capture" them. They "target" customers, employ a sales "force," hire "headhunters" to find new talent, pick their "battles," and make a "killing.

Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing.

Bezos only makes decisions in the first half of the day. If any important decision comes to him after noon, he won't make it, he'll say he's waiting until the next day. Because he knows he is cognitively there in the morning, in the best possible way. The mornings are for decisions, the afternoons are not.

Don't shy away from the fact that your product or service does less. Highlight it. Be proud of it. Sell it as aggressively as competitors sell their extensive feature lists.

Teach and you'll form a bond you just don't get from traditional marketing tactics.

Why don't we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren't worth the stress.