Quotes About Strategy

For diversification to work as a salve for the pains of loss, you must avoid looking at losses or gains in isolation.

Our advice? Put no more than 10 percent of your nest egg into stocks of individual corporations. The rest should be spread out over other kinds of investments.

So ask yourself: "If the stock market drops 25 percent tomorrow, would I be tempted to pull all or some of my money out?" If the answer is yes, you're probably unprepared for the ups and downs of the stock market.

That's why any money you'll need within the next five years should be removed from stocks and put into cash or cash equivalents like government bonds.

all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own. [2002] p.46

New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble.

Executives often wrongly equate "good value" with "low price." Instead, "good value" should mean outstanding value for the price.

Every institution is an assemblage of choices about how best to organize human beings in light of some particular goal. The premise of this book is that most of these choices can and must be revisited.

In our company the trick is to change jobs in time to guarantee that the long-term pay-off you promised four years ago in your capital budget proposal becomes someone else's short-term performance target.

you can become successful with less discipline than you think, for one simple reason: success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.

You never beat the game...You go in, take what you need, get out. Never stay too long and never, never try to whip the game. Stay there too long and they figure you out, start chewing at the corners on you, know your betting. Then maybe two, three of them get together and whipsaw you.

He decided to stop every hour for ten minutes. Derek had told him once that that was what the military did on long marches—a ten-minute break every hour

All the planning in the world, men, can't compare to perfectly timed good luck.

Everyone always feels better when there's a plan.

Imperialism's (or globalization's) image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one examine this dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the woman free choice as subject? In other words, how does one make the move from "Britain" to "Hinduism"?

I don't understand American football. If you're going to line a bunch of behemoths up in front of a bunch of other behemoths and ask them to hit each other as hard as they can, why tell them they can only hit one another a certain way? Too many rules, that's the problem.

The development of a responsible and effective strategic plan for a nonviolent struggle depends upon the careful formulation and selection of the grand strategy, strategies, tactics, and methods.

Just as military officers must understand force structures, tactics, logistics, munitions, the effects of geography, and the like in order to plot military strategy, political defiance planners must understand the nature and strategic principles of nonviolent struggle.

The best offense is a good defense, but a bad defense is offensive.

Yours is a race of pawns," Tzadkiel told me. "You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.

Because there is no opportunity to act. It is always wise to talk a great deal, discussing what has been done and what may be done, when nothing can be done. All the great political movements of history were born in prisons.

The most famous footballing episode was Captain Nevill's kicking a ball into No Man's Land on the first day of the Somme. A prize was offered to the first man to dribble the ball into the German trenches; Nevill himself scrambled out of the trench in pursuit of his goal and was cut down immediately. (Perhaps the Somme was not only an indictment of military strategy but also of the British propensity for the long-ball game.)