Quotes About Strategy

We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning.

All her life she had been such a planner, a plotter, a plodder. She planned meals the week before so she knew how to shop. She planned vacations a year in advance so they could save on airfare.

A process is a construct for organizing value-adding work to achieve a business-value milestone.

which animal the ruler should impersonate depends strongly on what animals the followers are.

In London, Jean Monnet – who had by now risen to be head of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, launched a daring, last-minute emergency plan: he wanted France and Great Britain to become one. A joint pool of shipping space had already been set up, just as in the First World War, but this time Monnet wanted to go much further. In a memorandum of less than five pages he proposed that the two countries become united: their armies, their

The business that my role generates is not always something that you can connect with my talks directly. ... if I go and build the brand by getting my name and the company name out there, it may generate business in a year or two. - Ivar Grimstad

Which leads me to ask...what exactly are you going to do when we get there?" I thought about it. "Rip Josh's nuggets off and feed them to his hamster?

Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his

He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general. Other than that he's a great military man. (describing Saddam Hussein of Iraq, 1991)

Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy.

Yesterday Iraq had the fourth largest Army in the world. Today they have the second largest Army in Iraq.

On Chiang Kai-Shek: "He's a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch."

Don't try to stay ten moves ahead of your opponent. Stay behind him with a knife.

Number eight of the ten Amazon commandments: never fight an opponent face-to-face if you couldn't defeat him. Wait and stab him in the back later.

His cunning gaze assesses the situation as if he's already considered three ways to destroy everyone present.

I've learned that while the finance goals are important, they're not the most important. Finance can hit all our objectives, and the company still can fail. After all, the best accounts receivables team on the planet can't save us if we're in the wrong market with the wrong product strategy with an R&D team that can't deliver.

In ten years, I'm certain every COO worth their salt will have come from IT. Any COO who doesn't intimately understand the IT systems that actually run the business is just an empty suit, relying on someone else to do their job.

What use is it having all these offshore developers building features if we aren't getting to market any faster? We

It stands to reason that if it is organized so that it can win, the business wins, too.

Are we playing to win and to establish the technical supremacy we need to keep up with what the business needs, or do we just keep limping along, shackled to things built decades ago, and tell our business leadership to throw in the towel and stop having good ideas?

how we design our organization dictates how work is performed, and, therefore, the outcomes we achieve. Throughout

Business agility is not just about raw speed. It's about how good you are at detecting and responding to changes in the market and being able to take larger and more calculated risks.

It is virtually impossible to make any business decision that doesn't result in at least one IT change.