Quotes About Strategy

The exercise of a skill is always under the dual control (a) of a fixed code of rules (which may be innate or acquired by learning) and (b) of a flexible strategy, guided by environmental pointers- the lie of the land.

The Royal Navy had not built its magnificent reputation over the centuries by avoiding battle.

It is not ferocity but cunning that strikes fear into the heart and forebodes danger; so true it is that the human brain is a more terrible weapon than the lion's paw.

En la vida pasa como con el ajedrez: en ambos trazamos, ciertamente, un plan, pero este queda total y completamente subordinado por aquello que, en el ajedrez, se le antoja hacer a nuestro adversario y, en la vida, al destino. La mayoría de las veces, las modificaciones resultantes son tan significativas que nuestro plan, cuando llega a realizarse, apenas queda reconocible en algunos rasgos básicos.

ten, kto wychodzi ze sporu zwyci?zc?, do?? cz?sto zawdzi?cza to nie tyle prawid?owo?ci s?du przy obronie swej tezy, ile sztuce i zr?czno?ci, z jak? to wykonywa?

to be superior (überlegen) to others in real life, the indispensable condition is to be thoughtful and deliberate (überlegt), in other words, to set to work in accordance with concepts.

Weinigen schrijven zoals een architect bouwt. Verreweg de meesten schrijven zoals men domino speelt.

Can starving people go on a hunger strike? And do hunger strikes work when they're not on TV?

And in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can't, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.

We are besieged by simple problems.... Checklists can provide protection

Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

And there is such a strategy—though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies. It is a checklist.

So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation. The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.

Such successes are not quite the result of logical thinking. But they are not the result of mere luck, either.

But Arnold had also recommended a strategy palliative care physicians use when they have to talk about bad news with people—they "ask, tell, ask." They ask what you want to hear, then they tell you, and then they ask what you understood. So I asked.

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist.

We had no backup plan should disaster have occurred.

What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?

Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence

I was thirty-five and I'd thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I'd been playing in some other game I didn't even know about. Like I'd been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid's face, a naked king with goat's horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect's voice.

A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.

Los comunistas no se sienten obligados a mantener las promesas que hacen a sus enemigos. A guisa de medios para conseguir sus fines, no vacilan en emplear todas las artimañas y astucias que pueden servirles —y esto incluye las amenazas y las promesas

Two thousand years of bad press and overheated prose, of film and opera, cannot conceal the fact that Cleopatra was a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank.

The initial buy-stop should have been placed right above the prior rally high