Quotes About Strategy

The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible.

History has its own evolutionary strategy, toward consequentialities we cannot anticipate.

How about this," I suggested. "Instead of feeling that you've blown the day and thinking, 'I'll get back on track tomorrow,' try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big.

In the Strategy of Pairing, I couple two activities, one that I need or want to do, and one that I don't particularly want to do, to get myself to accomplish them both. It's not a reward, it's not a treat, it's just a pairing.

The Strategy of Scheduling, of setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur, is one of the most familiar and powerful strategies of habit formation

People are more likely to make progress on goals that are broken into concrete, measurable actions, with some kind of structured accountability and positive reinforcement.

False Choice Loophole: This is the loophole-seeking strategy I most often invoke. I pose two activities in opposition, as though I have to make an either/or decision, when in fact, the two aren't necessarily in conflict.

Arranging to Fail Loophole: It's odd. Instead of fleeing temptation, we often plan to succumb.

One flashy kind of commitment device is the "nuclear option." A friend who enjoys experimenting with strategies of personal productivity used this approach to quit drinking for sixty days. He gave his assistant a stamped, addressed envelope with a check he'd written to an "anti-charity," an organization whose policies he passionately opposes, with the instruction to mail the check if he had a drink before the time was up.

Arranging to Fail Loophole:

Clarity is one reason that the Strategy of Scheduling is so helpful. It's important to have time to write; to have time with my family; to read. Instead of spending my day in a chaos of warring priorities, and feeling as though whatever I do I'm leaving important things undone, I can use the clarity of Scheduling to guarantee that I have time and energy to devote to each activity that matters.

Échecs (jeu des). Image de la tactique militaire. Tous les grands capitaines y étaient forts. Trop sérieux pour un jeu, trop futile pour une science.

The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.

If you can't describe your business model in ten words or fewer, you don't have a business model.

Hiring better than yourself means that you hire for strengths as opposed to hiring on the basis of the lack of weaknesses. A great leader hires people for their strengths and then assigns them tasks that take advantage of those strengths.

The wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get it to market, and iterate quickly. If you wait for ideal circumstances in which you have all the information you need (which is impossible), the market will pass you by.

His idea is to get your team together and pretend that your product has failed. That's right: failed, cratered, imploded, or "went aloha oe," as we say in Hawaii. You ask the team to come up with all the reasons why the failure occurred. Then each member has to state one reason until every reason is on a list. The next step is to figure out ways to prevent every reason from occurring.

Bootstrapping goes awry when entrepreneurs focus on saving pennies to the detriment of the Big Picture.

Smart writers understand that writing is also a business. Really smart writers see themselves also as entrepreneurs. Barry Eisler

We recommend that you repurpose your most popular blog posts and convert them into SlideShare presentations.

Sharing good stuff is 90 percent of the battle of getting more followers. Almost everything else is merely optimization. End of discussion.

How long should our business plan be? Answer you're looking for: "You shouldn't write a business plan. You should get customers.

Do you think we need a real CEO? Answer you're looking for: "Maybe, someday. But probably not right now. What you really need right now is a great product.

The night before the game I think about every pitch he might throw me, and then, after I've seen that pitch once the next day, my picture of that pitch is so strong, if he made any kind of mistake I would do some damage.