Quotes About Strategy

You want to keep intelligence separate from policy.

The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.

Climbing into the ring, the best-prepared fighter is the one who has tried to understand their opponent. Especially if it's yourself.

We watches de white man, and we keeps watching de white man till we finds out which way de white man's gwine to vote; an when we finds out which way de white man's gwine to vote, den we vote xactly de other way. Den we know we's right.

The fifth set is not about tennis, it's about nerves

When the Labour benches cheered, the Tories were still plotting to get rid of him.

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

The place of chess in the society is closely related to the attitude of young people towards our game.

The more common method of getting rid of an evil, is to merge it in a greater. Thus, if one suffers a loss of half his fortune at play, he overcomes his mortification by--losing the other half. The most ingenious expedient of this kind, was that of the indigent gentleman of rank, who married his washerwoman to get rid of her bill against him.

That first game of the fifth set goes deuce and several times.

Brad Gilbert

Haven't you ever played Uno?... Sometimes you have to lose all your cards to win.

Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it,

In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations," says Ross, who went on to cofound eCommera, a British e-commerce advisory firm. "But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people's products.

We pay attention to what our competitors do but it's not where we put our energy.

But don't be worried about our competitors because they`re never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads-down focused."15

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini

Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously, with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match.

If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you've got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave.

Jeff always said that when you focus on the business inputs, then the outputs such as revenue and income will take care of themselves.

In the copy he brought to Kathryn Dalzell, he had underlined one particular passage in which Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos's point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.

he liked to say he didn't have an exit strategy—he was building a company for the long term.

These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It's an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.