Quotes About Strategy

A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

management by objectives—MBO

In other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process.

But today's gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.

if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage.

I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today's gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today's gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.

We now discover that management is not just a team game, it is a game in which we have to fashion a team of teams, where the various individual teams exist in some suitable and mutually supportive relationship with each other.

Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, "Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization." Or, we might say, on a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage.

A manager must keep many balls in the air at the same time and shift his energy and attention to activities that will most increase the output of his organization. In other words, he should move to the point where his leverage will be the greatest.

The ability to recognize that the winds have shifted and to take appropriate action before you wreck your boat in crucial to the future of an enterprise

Had (President) Kennedy turned to his advisers and wailed, "What can we beat the Russians at?" and if someone had cried "Backgammon!" at that point, Apollo would never have happened.

Programmers need to learn about the business problem that needs to be solved.

Are you better on your worst day to beat your opponent on their best?

You stand still, you get caught. You run, you get tired. So.... Learn to lie. Then learn to lie in wait.

Camouflage doesn't help when the other guy is willing to defoliate the whole jungle.

When you hunt predators, the best camouflage is weakness.

You must win general elections. Having done so, you can ignore the masses for the next three or four years,

In politics there is nothing simpler than simply talking, and nothing more complicated than simply acting.

If the ability to make use of experience and draw conclusions decided, we would have forgotten what war is a long time ago. But those whose goal is war have never been held back, nor will be, by experience or analogy.

when they're about to hang you, ask for a glass of water. You never know what might happen before they bring it.

But you don't even know how to destroy things wisely,' Zoltan griped, ordering yet another attempt to pull a wheel out of a hole. 'Why can't you remove the stones gradually, from the edges of the road? You're like children! Instead of eating a doughnut systematically, you gouge the jam out with a finger and then throw away the rest because it's not sweet any more.

If the ability to make use of experience and draw conclusions decided, we would have forgotten what war is a long time ago. But those whose goal is war have never been held back, nor will be, by experience or analogy." "So…

For a war is raging, and disinformation is a weapon whose blade must always be kept sharp.

winning battles by means of a rapid escape from the battlefield is permissible from the point of view of most military doctrines. The