Quotes About Strategy

Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.

Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart.

We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.

But defeating one's enemies is only half the game; for a war to be truly justifiable one has to materially gain.

The one possibility that Sanders tended to discount entirely was a landing at Gallipoli's southern tip, simply because the most basic rules of military logic—even mere common sense—argued against it.

It seems to me that we are rather in the position of the hunters who divided up the skin of the bear before they had killed it. I personally cannot foresee the situation in which we may find ourselves at the end of the war, and I therefore think that any discussion at the present time of how we are going to cut up the Turkish Empire is chiefly of academic interest. BRITISH GENERAL GEORGE MACDONOGH, DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, JANUARY 7, 1916

Plans act as a forcing function against all kinds of stupidity because they demand that important issues be resolved while there is time to consider other options. As Abraham Lincoln said, "If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend four hours sharpening the axe," which I take to mean that smart preparation minimizes work.

Einstein once said, "If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it,

Negotiation is useful not only in a crisis situation, but also in management. Good negotiators work from people's interests, not their positions.

Is it better to invest time in making a big masterful plan or instead to start immediately and figure it out as you go?

Being a good lead is all about switching hats: knowing which level of abstraction to work at to solve a problem. It's rarely a question of intelligence; instead, it's picking the right perspective to use on a particular challenge.

Someone has to define what we're trying to get to and clarify which ideas are both more and less important in completing that vision.

Starting a company, or even a project team, is an exceedingly hard challenge, but in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems.

At the heart of the debate over how to overcome the challenges of shipping good things is an idea referenced in the title of Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar.1 The book, which is about observations on making software, raises a central question that is relevant to all work: Is it better to invest time in making a big masterful plan or instead to start immediately and figure it out as you go?

Projects are complex non-linear systems and have significant inertia. If you wait to see acute problems before taking action, you will be too late and may make things worse.

a leader in a crisis situation has better odds of success if she can see emotional patterns and make use of different ways to manage them.

good thinking wins,

Politics is a kind of problem solving. No matter what organizational challenge you face, and how frustrating it might be, it's just another kind of problem to solve.

Succession planning must be part of any long-term leader's thinking, and it has to be done now.

meetings can be used to stay ahead, flagging issues before they become blockers.

Knowing how much friction is needed and when to apply it is the skill that successful leaders, from the coach of a competitive basketball team to the conductor of an orchestra, must master.

After years of leading projects, the best thing I've learned is that I have to periodically shift between thinking small (bazaar) and thinking long term (cathedral).

I'd take a great team with bad methods over a lousy team with great methods any day.

Too many would-be beautiful businesses that could reinvent markets and create substantial value live only in PowerPoint documents, never to be launched.