Quotes About Strategy

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.

At Leyte Gulf we used eight carriers, eight light carriers, and sixteen escort carriers — thirty-two in all.

In our two fleets participating in the Philippines battle we had twelve battleships to the enemy's nine.

Politics is like dice: the better the player, the worse the man.

What are any of us but pawns in the schemes of the great?

There are many ways to obtain our desires, ma petite. Remember that, for it will serve you well.

Czasem musimy zada? cios pierwsi, zanim inni go nam zadadz?.

A better strategy for shifting other's expectations about your work is to consistently deliver what you promise instead of consistently explaining how you're working.

Here's a case where someone successfully followed their passion," they say, "therefore 'follow your passion' must be good advice." This is faulty logic. Observing a few instances of a strategy working does not make it universally effective.

To maximize your chances of success, you should deploy small, concrete experiments that return concrete feedback.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution,

Grant's productivity depends on many factors, there's one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted

entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by start-ups that begin with cheap offerings at the low end of the market, but then, over time, improve their cheap products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share. Grove recognized that Intel faced this threat from low-end processors produced by upstart companies like AMD and Cyrix.

Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four "disciplines" (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply.

To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable. It's better to hire three smart subordinates to think deeply about the problem and then bring their solutions to the executive for a final decision.

Alex Berger, he didn't arrive at his outstanding job by following a clear passion. Instead he carefully and persistently gathered career capital, confident that valuable skills would translate into valuable opportunities.

Discipline #2: Act on the Lead Measures

Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren't dreaming of taking over the world.

Mike Jackson leveraged the craftsman mindset to do whatever he did really well, thus ensuring that he came away from each experience with as much career capital as possible. He never had elaborate plans for his career. Instead, after each working experience, he would stick his head up to see who was interested in his newly expanded store of capital, and then jump at whatever opportunity seemed most promising.

People play differently when they're keeping score," the 4DX authors explain.

Mike's goal with his spreadsheet is to become more "intentional" about how his workday unfolds. "The easiest thing to do is to show up to work in the morning and just respond to e-mail the whole day," he explained. "But that is not the most strategic way to spend your time.

According to Johnson's theory, Sarah would have been better served by first mastering a promising niche—a task that may take years—and only then turning her attention to seeking a mission.

recommend the habit of a weekly review in which you make a plan for the workweek ahead (see Rule #4). During my experiments with 4DX, I used a weekly review to look over my scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead.