Quotes About Strategy

It doesn't make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key. It's easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.

And too often, that purpose is simply a backward way of saying, "I'd like to sell more of what I've already decided to sell.

Nine women can't have a baby in one month, no matter how closely they coordinate their work.

Most entrepreneurs don't think about money too much when they decide to start a business. When's the last time you asked someone at a cocktail party what he does, and he responded, "Every month, I generate more cash than I spend"?

Da bi postigao svoj cilj ?ak i ?avo citira Bibliju.

You seem to forget, Dickon, that we are dealing with the Spider King. Louis realized, just as you have, that it would take more to mate dog to cat than a shared lust for the English crown.

You might as well face it. You're not going to be able to fight for the crown. You'll just have to grit your teeth and let us hand it over to you at the bargaining table.

My father and brother were slain at Sandal Castle because they engaged a far superior force. It was daring, heroic, foolhardy…and fatal. I'll not make the same mistake.

The Welsh do make the worst enemies. They do not play by your rules, they win when they're not supposed to, and they do not know when they're beaten.

He was too astute a politician, too ambitious a Prince, to confuse friendship with statecraft.

And if Harry spun webs to make a spider proud, Eleanor could entangle archangels in her snares.

In debate he thought high and aimed low.

Between opponents who will not physically fight, a punch line is equivalent to a punch.

On paper, in the colonel's lamp-lit office, when we saw a problem it was easy to fix; all we had to do was direct that corps commanders regulate their columns so as not to delay each other, halting until crossroads were clear, keeping their riles well closed, and so forth. It didn't work that way on the ground, which was neither flat nor clean - nor, as it turned out, dry

Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar on theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.

Grant was as usual a good deal more intent on what he had in mind to do to the enemy than he was on what the enemy might or might not do to him.

In defensive warfare he was perfect," he wrote years later. "When the hunt was up, his combativeness was overruling.

When General Johnston had heard them out, he drew himself up in the saddle, leather creaking, and said quietly: "Gentlemen, we shall attack at daylight tomorrow.

Two commanders on the same field are always one too many

severing Sherman's life line he would provoke him into rashness or oblige him to retreat.

Grant agreed at least with the final sentence - which he later paraphrased and sharpened into a maxim: 'Two commanders on the same field are always one too many.' (p. 188)

More militerry, less skools.

If I want to play mind games, I'd buy a Rubik's cube. ~ Acheron, a character.

The tiger lies low not from fear, but for aim. ~Wren