Quotes About Strategy

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Of all the weapons vital for a speedy victory, the most vital is information.

Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.

He [Woodrow Wilson] could write Notes from Sinai or Olympus; he could remain unapproachable in the White House or even in the Council of Ten and be safe. But if he once stepped down to the intimate equality of the Four, the game was evidently up.

When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.

People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.

People] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other altertives.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others

Once it is common, cooperation is evolutionarily stable. The problem is how it becomes common in the first place, because defection is also stable.

I'd much rather lose a campaign than lose a war.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

Forego's customer churn was high because they sold too low in companies for small dollars. Selling small deals at low levels in a company, without the customer understanding the tangible business value of the product, causes a high degree of customer churn. If a customer doesn't understand the business value of a subscription product, the customer won't renew their annual subscription.

There are two ways to beat the cruelty of a harsh environment: You can become stronger or you can become smarter.

I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas.

For me, journalism has been more a matter of projecting a particular approach to covering policies, to covering issues. It was a continuation of what I tried to do in government.

And if quality were truly the goal, then how come a company like Rolls Royce very nearly went bankrupt?

To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.

organization?" he asks. "The goal is to produce products as efficiently as we can," I tell him. "Wrong," says Jonah. "That's not it. What is the real goal?

Alex, you cannot understand the meaning of productivity unless you know what the goal is. Until then, you're just playing a lot of games with numbers and words." "Okay, then it's market share," I tell him. "That's the goal." "Is it?" he asks. He steps into the plane. "Hey! Can't you tell me?" I call to him. "Think about it, Alex. You can find the answer with your own mind," he says.

The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money," I say to him. "And everything else we do is a means to achieve the goal.

En todos lados, el mejoramiento ha sido interpretado como sinónimo de ahorro en costos. La gente se concentra en reducir el gasto de operación como si fuera el indicador mas importante.

We need a process," he says. "That's obvious. It's too bad that the five-step process that we developed turned out to be false. No . . . Wait a minute Alex, that's not the case. At the end, the problem was not wandering bottlenecks. It was insufficient protection for the existing bottlenecks. Maybe we can use that five-step process?