Quotes About Execution

To his brother Edgar he confided, "I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander—things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.

Proverbially, no military plan survives contact with the enemy. That is never truer than when there is no plan to begin with.

Don't Just Talk About What You can Do; Make It Happen!

A good shooter taking a great shot is better than a great shooter taking a bad one.

references to a few clear and simple strategic priorities, to the importance of building culture and developing talent, and to leveraging a few core capabilities.

Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one which crosses your desk.

We spend time as investors thinking about the ability to accelerate or sustain elevated growth, as well as working with management teams to try and minimize the execution risk associated with that growth.

Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do

It's just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.

There are good reasons for the superiority of if/when-then plans: the specific sequencing of elements within the plans can help us defeat the traditional enemies of goal achievement. The "if/when-then" wording is designed to put us on high alert for a particular time or circumstance when a productive action could be performed. We become prepared, first, to notice the favorable time or circumstance and, second, to associate it automatically and directly with desired conduct.

The trick to getting things done is to list things to do in doable order.

There is nothing more essential to getting a project off the ground than the underestimate.

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

The cost of automating acceptance tests is so small in comparison to the cost of executing manual test plans that it makes no economic sense to write scripts for humans to execute.

Am I suggesting 100% test coverage? No, I'm not suggesting it. I'm demanding it. Every single line of code that you write should be tested. Period. Isn't that unrealistic? Of course not. You only write code because you expect it to get executed. If you expect it to get executed, you ought to know that it works. The only way to know this is to test it.

He angrily rejected a disparaging remark about the literary quality of Chernyshevsky's work, and confessed that it had influenced him profoundly, particularly when he reread it after his brother's execution: "It captivated my brother, and it captivated me. It made me over completely. . . .

Results are important, but the way they are achieved, the process, is equally important.

What you know must translate into action, and action must translate into knowledge. In this way strategy becomes a lifelong challenge and the source of constant pleasure in surmounting difficulties and solving problems.

Reading and thinking about [new ideas] won't work. You must put them into effect.

The best strategy is always to be very strong first in general, then at the decisive point.... There is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one's forces concentrated.... In short the first principle is: act with the utmost concentration. On War, Carl von Clausewitz, 1780-1831

You may have brilliant ideas, you may be able to invent unbeatable strategies—but if the group that you lead, and that you depend on to execute your plans, is unresponsive and uncreative, and if its members always put their personal agendas first, your ideas will mean nothing. You must learn the lesson of war: it is the structure of the army—the chain of command and the relationship of the parts to the whole—that will give your strategies force.

I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.

Execution is everything. Even if you start a business with the wrong idea or too many competitors, you can out-execute all the better ideas in the right market.