Quotes About Strategy

The entrepreneur is comfortable raising money, hiring and firing, renting more office space than she needs right now. The entrepreneur must dream big and persuade others to share her dream. The freelancer, on the other hand, can focus on craft. She can most easily build her business by doing great work, consistently.

It's hard for me to imagine how a $50 million marketing campaign is ever appropriate for any business to launch an ideavirus. If you need to interrupt that many people, you're doing something wrong.

Winners understand that taking that pain now prevents a lot more pain later.

If you're trying to persuade the tribe at work to switch from one strategy to the other, don't start with the leader of the opposition. Begin instead with the passionate individuals who haven't been embraced by other tribes yet. As you add more and more people like these, your option becomes safer and more powerful—then you'll see the others join you.

Are you overinvesting (really significantly overinvesting) time and money so that you have a much greater chance of dominating a market? And if you don't have enough time and money, do you have the guts to pick a different, smaller market to conquer? Once you're doing those things, then you get it.

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Before you enter a new market, consider what would happen if you managed to get through the Dip and win in the market you're already in.

The New York Times was offered a deal with Amazon during the 1990s. It would have transformed the economics of the paper and delivered billions of dollars in revenue over time. According to former CFO Diane Baker, senior management turned it down. They were worried that they would upset Barnes & Noble, which at the time was a big advertiser. Management had nostalgia for a future with steady increases in their current business, and felt threatened by a radical shift in that future.

The entire organization works for and with the marketer, because marketing is all of it. What we make, how we make it, who we make it for. It is the effects and the side effects, the pricing and the profit, all at once.

If you tell your competition your tactics, they'll steal them and it will cost you. But if you tell them your strategy, it won't matter. Because they don't have the guts or the persistence to turn your strategy into their strategy.

Annie Duke, former world champion of poker, teaches us that there's a huge gap between a good decision and a good outcome. A good decision is based on what we know of the options and the odds. A good outcome happens or it doesn't: it is a consequence of the odds, not the hidden answer.

Industries don't die by surprise. It's not as if you didn't know it was coming. It's not as if you didn't know whom to call (or hire).

The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us even more!

Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, told me, "We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.

If the game is designed for you to lose, don't play that game. Play a different one.

Most leaders focus only on the third tactic. A bigger tribe somehow equals a better tribe. In fact, the first two tactics almost always lead to more impact. Every action you take as a leader can affect these three elements, and the challenge is to figure out which one to maximize.

Innovative marketers invent new solutions to work with old emotions.

Effective marketers have the courage to create tension.

Leadership almost always involves thinking and acting like the underdog.

Believe it or not, quitting is often a great strategy, a smart way to manage your life and your career.

It's hard to imagine Tim Cook blurbing a Samsung phone. That's because Apple seeks to corner the market, not to spread an idea or create a positive change. They're in the business of raising their stock price, and everything else is merely a tactic.

When you market to someone who doesn't have a pattern yet, you don't have to persuade them that their old choices were mistakes.

The same way soldiers realize that it's war that makes generals

The problem is obvious—if you spend all day hitting the ball back, you'll never end up serving.

Jay Levinson famously said, "Don't change your ads when you're tired of them. Don't change them when your employees are tired of them. Don't even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.