Quotes About Strategy

The only trump card I have to beat is the bluff."

You don't catch big fish with a small pole, nor do you catch small fish with a big hook."

Every major movement in world history has recognized the strategic importance of mobilizing children. The Nazis had their Hitler Youth bands. The Chinese Communists had their Red Guards. The Taliban in Afghanistan had their madrasah schools to instill extremism in the young. The great omission seems to be unique to Christians.

A slick way to outfigure a person is to get him figuring you figure he's figuring you're figuring he'll figure you aren't really figuring what you want him to figure you figure.

When all else fails, try passive-aggression.

Play the game without mercy, play to win

Good intelligence wins battles long before the first arrow is shot or the first sword is drawn from its scabbard.

Every day's delay on your part, therefore, seriously interferes with General Grant's plans," warned the crusty chief of staff.37

What I know about poker, you can fit into a thimble with room left over, but I'm learning.

We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

premortem. The procedure is simple: when the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision. The premise of the session is a short speech: "Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

The technical definition of heuristic is a simple procedure that helps find adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difficult questions. The

As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations—for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller. As you may have experienced when negotiating for the first time in a bazaar, the initial anchor has a powerful effect. My

Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.

Burton Malkiel's wonderful book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Acquiring expertise in chess is harder and slower than learning to read because there are many more letters in the "alphabet" of chess and because the "words" consist of many letters. After thousands of hours of practice, however, chess masters are able to read a chess situation at a glance.

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision appears to have been made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much-needed direction.

The premortem is not a panacea and does not provide complete protection against nasty surprises, but it goes some way toward reducing the damage of plans that are subject to the biases of WYSIATI and uncritical optimism.

But the main problem was that we failed to allow for what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the "unknown unknowns

Plans are best-case scenarios. Let's avoid anchoring on plans when we forecast actual outcomes. Thinking about ways the plan could go wrong is one way to do it.

They instructed negotiators to focus their attention and search their memory for arguments against the anchor.

Scholars in other disciplines found it useful, and the ideas of heuristics and biases have been used productively in many fields, including medical diagnosis, legal judgment, intelligence analysis, philosophy, finance, statistics, and military strategy.

If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it." P