Quotes About Strategy

If you're really ahead of the game, plagiarism is a trap you want your competitors to fall into!

The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a "horror strategy.

Great leaders sometimes need to appear unbalanced, he thought: "What seems 'balanced' and 'safe' in a crisis is often the most risky.

Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them—if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or

national competitive advantage

one might expect in view of the potentially higher level of competitive loss free revealing would entail.

A SWOT analysis involves asking, "What are our strengths and weaknesses? What are our opportunities? What are the threats?

Talent is useful, but always keep your dagger sharp.

She fastened the invisible corset of her composure snugly around herself and prepared to move forward with her plan.

Human motivation rarely boils down either to pure, disinterested emotion or to scheming, material strategy. 11 In any case, that the eighteenth century witnessed a great surge of romantic emotion which washed away all mercenary stains is unlikely in the extreme.

No one ever won a chess game by betting on each move. Sometimes you have to move backward to get a step forward.

Meekness: Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

Poker, n. A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown.

J'ai lu dernièrement ce témoignage d'un ambassadeur israélien sur sa carrière dans les années cinquante et soixante : "Notre mission était délicate, parce qu'il nous fallait à la fois persuader les Arabes qu'Israël était invincible, et persuader l'Occident qu'Israël était en danger de mort.

You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did," noted Director of National Intelligence James Clapper after the OPM breach.80 From an intelligence perspective, it was a masterstroke.

In geopolitics, the same information is not available to everyone, regardless of how much time they have. Intelligence is in the business of unlocking other people's secrets and protecting our own. Asymmetric information is the name of the game. And in a world of asymmetric information, prediction is much more difficult and miscalculation much more likely.

Put most simply, intelligence is information that gives policymakers an advantage over their adversaries.

It's hard to overstate just how foreign the worlds of Washington and Silicon Valley are to each other. At the exact moment when great-power conflict is making a comeback and harnessing technology is the key to success, Silicon Valley and Washington are still working on working together.

In 2018, the Pentagon moved from hunkering down and defending American computer systems against incoming attacks to embracing a proactive, take-the-fight-to-them-every-day strategy called Defend Forward.

Cheating and covering up are natural by-products of a top-down culture that does not accept "no" or "it can't be done" for an answer. But combining this culture with a belief that a brilliant strategy formulated in the past will hold indefinitely into the future becomes a certain recipe for failure.

Solvay Business School Professor Paul Verdin and I developed a perspective that frames an organization's strategy as a hypothesis rather than a plan.62 Like all hypotheses, it starts with situation assessment and analysis –strategy's classic tools. Also, like all hypotheses, it must be tested through action. When strategy is seen as a hypothesis to be continually tested, encounters with customers provide valuable data of ongoing interest to senior executives.

Imagine if Wells Fargo had adopted an agile approach to strategy: the company's top management would then have taken repeated instances of missed targets or false accounts as useful data to help it assess the efficacy of the original cross-selling strategy. This learning would then have triggered much-needed strategic adaptation.

My short answer? No. I don't think you can have too much psychological safety. I do think, however, that you can have not enough discipline. Psychological safety is about reducing interpersonal fear. Making it less heroic to ask a question or admit an error. It doesn't mean you automatically have a good strategy for getting the work done. It also doesn't mean

If we want to get our foreign policy right - if we don't want to be perpetually caught off guard, fighting unwinnable wars, and stuck having to choose between third- and fourth-best options - the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad. And if we want to save our nation, we need to come to grips with its growing power at home.