Quotes About Strategy

When you are starting a new business you don't want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly.

Young entrepreneurs should spend an awful lot of time thinking about what they want to go into.

You are always racing against the other swimmers, but I always try to just focus on what I'm doing and how I want to swim my races.

The time you want the map... is before you enter the woods

I decided at the outset to invest in a fairly broad range of businesses, as I didn't want to get pigeonholed into one sector.

The last player you want the ball to go to is the best player on the planet.

Today was about execution, period. Every single player, all of us in the dressing room right now, we're embarrassed because that's not the way we want to play soccer.

That strategy of racing for the top five and racing for the win is where everybody wants to be.

My cousin Francis and I are in perfect accord - he wants Milan, and so do I.

I would tell anyone who wants something from someone else to feign not wanting it. People are perverse. If you show great affection to them, they'll run the other way.

SEO is knowing what the search engines want and giving it to them... so hard they f***ing bleed

Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

The value of a company can be derived from adding the value of all future dividends written down to net present value. Therefore, a reasoned view of the future is essential.

He took refuge in the concept that sometimes slowest is the fastest in the end.

If…there is a conflict between structure and strategy, the structure will win.

What matters about creating alignment around a strategy is not the volume of communication, but its quality and precision.

Having worked out what matters most now, pass the message on to others and give them responsibility for carrying out their part in the plan. Keep it simple. Don't tell people what to do and how to do it. Instead, be as clear as you can about your intentions. Say what you want people to achieve and, above all, tell them why. Then ask them to tell you what they are going to do as a result.

What cannot be made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.

If company objectives are in conflict with personal ones, only one of them will win. Either the employees leave the company (as regularly happens in the most obvious form of conflict – forced redundancy) or the strategy will be sabotaged, consciously or unconsciously.

Strategy is about fighting the right battles, the important ones you are likely to win. Operations are about winning them.

If Clausewitz is right, no one should develop a strategy without taking into account the effects of organizational friction. Yet we continue to be surprised and frustrated when it manifests itself. We tend to think everything has gone wrong when in fact everything has gone normally.

Kanalkampfführer' – Channel Battle Leader.

The trouble is that organizations like processes. They are warm, familiar things and can be rolled out fairly easily. It is therefore tempting to understand strategy execution as a process, distribute the forms, get everyone to fill them in, and relax. The result will be resentment, rigidity, and stagnation.

A briefing cascade will only work properly if the organizational structure broadly reflects the task structure implied by the strategy. If it is in conflict with the strategy, it should be changed before anything else.