Quotes About Strategy

The best way to tell a winner from a loser is this: A winner is a person who knows what he'll do next if he loses, but doesn't talk about it; a loser is one who doesn't know what he'll do if he loses, but talks about what he'll do if he wins.

A game looks like a set of operations, but after the payoff it becomes apparent that these operations were really maneuvers; not honest requests but moves in the game.

Morgenthau quotes

It's easy to see why pitchers respect McGwire. If you hit behind him, they're saying that they don't respect you. You have to change their thinking.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Like Machiavelli himself, he [Edward Luttwak] enjoys truth not only because it is true but also because it shocks the naive

By this point in the war Lee had become a master at outlining a course of action that was specific enough to obtain the necessary bureaucratic backing but vague enough to allow him maximum flexibility of action once underway.

I wonder if Napoleon or even Robt. Lee were our commander this evening would they pursue a defeated army in this cautious, courteous way?

The Philadelphia studies suggest that place-based interventions are far more likely to succeed than people-based projects.

Sometimes when I listen to fellow progressives, I wonder if the only lesson we took away from the '04 elections is that politics is a word game.

Perhaps the most instructive experience is to see the way governments all over the world are exclaiming, "What are we going to do about the United States?!

And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they've gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.

In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.' Jose Raul Capablanca

Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don't need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision - a way to be more successful - they have to remain nimble enough to take it.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

All innovation begins with vision. It's what happens next that is critical.

It is insufficient to exhort workers to try harder. Our current problems are caused by trying too hard—at the wrong things.

The CEO and VP of product, instead of building their business, are engaged in the drudgery of solving just one customer's problem. Instead of marketing themselves to millions, they sold themselves to one.

when you have only one test, you don't have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell.

Think big. Start small. Scale fast.

achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.

we were much more likely to run experiments on our customers than we were to cater to their whims.

The one envelope at a time approach is called "single-piece flow