Quotes About Strategy

Everybody wants to disown neocon strategy, including the neocons, because that strategy never worked. Still, it was, in point of fact, a strategy. Nobody else has one.

I think we really need a movement to drive how popular culture understands the issues that feminists care about. When I think about the LGBT movement for example, they have had a really intentional strategy to try to change images and representation of LGBT people in the media and the culture. It really moved the dial politically. That's what is needed in the women's movement - a strategy that can drive awareness and culture change.

A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is. And lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you'll go out of business.

With the level of uncertainty we see today, more people are asking, how can you develop a strategy in a world that keeps changing so fast? They are afraid that a set of rigid principles will hinder their ability to react quickly. I argue that it is precisely at such times that you need a strategy.

Many times when people have a vision, they think in terms of a big vision - I want to take my city for Christ. But the problem with many pastors and this type of vision is this: they haven't developed the strategy to fulfill that vision. A pastor preaches a dream or vision to his/her people, they get excited for a week, a month, or a couple of months, but there is no strategy, planning, or process to fulfill that vision.

If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.

The height of strategy, is to attack your opponent's strategy.

The more usual reason for adopting a strategy of limited aim is that of awaiting a change in the balance of force ... The essential condition of such a strategy is that the drain on him should be disproportionately greater than on oneself.

Strategy is important, but trust is the hidden variable. On paper you can have clarity around your objectives, but in a low-trust environment, your strategy won't be executed.

One of the problems many leaders report is a gap between strategy and execution. Usually this "gap" arises because the so-called "strategy" is a set of financial performance goals, not an approach to overcoming challenges. The two key ways to narrow this gap are to avoid bad strategies that fail to explain how to proceed and to establish a proximate objective - something which can be accomplished and which will open the door to further progress.

To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

The greenest fuels are the ones that contain the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, piped, and burnt. [In contrast], extracting comparable amounts of energy from the surface would entail truly monstrous environmental disruption.... The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn't, and so to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.

Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.

You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That's our role.

When you have attained the way of strategy there will be nothing that you cannot understand. You will see the way in everything.

Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation

Kim Jong-Un is a dangerous leader, without a doubt. And both Republican and Democrat administrations have been completely ineffective in dealing with him. So we must continue to isolate him. We will need China as part of that strategy.

Strategy is indeed about choosing what not to do as well as what to do. A business unit needs to decide what need it aims to satisfy in what group of people and with what value proposition that distinguishes the business from its competitors.

The foes now are universal - poverty, famine, religious radicalization, desertification, drugs, proliferation of nuclear weapons, ecological devastation. They threaten all nations, just as science and information are the potential friends of all nations. Classical diplomacy and strategy were aimed at identifying enemies and confronting them. Now they have to identify dangers, global or local, and tackle them before they become disasters.

Since the events of September 11, weve rightfully changed our military strategy so were now taking the fight to those individuals who aim to do us harm, rather than waiting for another atrocious attack to happen.

As former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pointed out, if you build a 50-foot wall, you'll soon be confronted with a 51-foot ladder. You need a strategy that involves layered defense: deployed patrols, sophisticated sensor equipment, and surveillance from the air. That is what has had a positive impact over the last generation.

We never really know what we want until after we get it. If after we get it, it makes life more miserable, we know that isn't what we wanted. If it makes our life wonderful, we know this is a strategy which will meet out need. That's why Paul Tillich, the theologian says we need to sin courageously. You ask for what you want, hoping to meet your needs. If you get it and it makes life worse, you learn that this isn't what I want.

Through our government's updated science, technology and innovation strategy, we are making the record investments necessary to push the boundaries of knowledge, create jobs and opportunities, and improve the quality of life of Canadians. Our government's Canada Research Chairs Program develops, attracts and retains top talent researchers in Canada whose research, in turn, creates long-term social and economic benefits while training the next generation of students and researchers in Canada.

Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy . . . Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.

Occasionally we are asked whether it would make sense to modify our investment strategy to perform better in today's financial climate. Our answer, as you might guess, is: No! It would be easyfor us to capitulate to the runaway bull market in growth and technology stocks. And foolhardy. And irresponsible. And unconscionable. It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it. Yet distancing yourself from the crowd is an essential component of long-term investment success.

Branding is the process of connecting good strategy with good creativity.

The role of the board is advice and consent. If the CEO does not lay out a clear strategy and tries to get the board to set one, it will usually end in disaster.

The loan crisis and the increasing slashing of funds for students, coupled with the astronomical rise in tuition, represent an unparalleled attack on the social state. The hidden agenda here is that when students graduate with such high debts, they rarely choose a career in public service; instead, they are forced to go into the corporate sector, and I see these conditions, in some ways, as being very calculated and as part of a larger political strategy to disempower students.

Chess computers do not sweat during time pressure and commit costly blunders. Furthermore, the strength of these programs (over and above their faultless recall processes) lies in their capacity to make relatively superficial tactical decisions with incredible speed. Positional values, long-range strategy, aesthetic judgment, and political astuteness remain staples of human performance, man vs. machine results in the foreseeable future to the contrary not withstanding.

We're going to get gored to death by a feral fugging hog and your best strategy is to pretend it's a grizzly bear?

All good strategy eventually degenerates into work.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

In the 1920s, we thought the problems associated with alcohol could be solved by police and jails. Prohibition taught us we were wrong. The strategy of the present drug war is Prohibition redux.

I think that the war on drugs is domestic Vietnam. And didn't we learn from Vietnam that, at a certain point in the war, we should stop and rethink our strategy, ask ``Why are we here, what are we doing, what's succeeded, what's failed?'' And we ought to do that with the domestic Vietnam, which is the war on drugs.

The Republican party does have a lot of work to do. But changing our principles is not a winning strategy. We need to modernize, not moderate.

My main expertise is in the past, but if I have to extrapolate into the future, I would say: no good news any time soon and an obvious exit strategy is not apparent to me.

It's part of the strategy to remind people who Hillary Rodham Clinton actually is. If others aren't going to hold her account for her full record, then, yes, we will. And her record includes naming and blaming women who came in contact with her husband, whether it was consensual relationships like Monica Lewinsky, an intern at the White House with him as President, completely debasing the office of the White House - the office of The Presidency - or Jennifer Flowers, 12-year affair while he was Governor of Arkansas.

When you lack cohesion, it becomes difficult to have a clear marketing strategy.

What makes a good client, to me, is one that signed on for the strategy as well as the execution, not just the end product.

If your flirting strategy is indistinguishable from harassment, it's not everyone else that's the problem.

I'm not a policy and a strategy guy. I'm - you know, the military basically supports what the president wants, the decisions that he makes.

Thirdly, the gentleman warrior, carrying the weaponry of his way. The way of the warrior is to master the virtue of his weapons. If a gentleman dislikes strategy he will not appreciate the benefit of weaponry, so must he not have a little taste for this?

For me the starting point for everything - before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience - is work ethic. Without one of significant magnitude, you're dead in the water.

Just as meekness is in all our virtues, so is pride in all our sins. Whatever its momentary and alluring guise, pride is the enemy, "the first of the sins." One reason to be particularly on guard against pride is that "the devilish strategy of Pride is that it attacks us, not in our weakest points, but in our strongest. It is preeminently the sin of the noble mind." Not only of the noble mind, but also of the semi-righteous.

Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands.

Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.

The violent, antirationalistic impulse in Western countries is reacting to an intellectual state of affairs in which all thinking has become strategy; this impulse shows a disgust for a certain form of self-preservation. It is a sensitive shivering from the cold breath of a reality where knowledge is power and power is knowledge.

In McKinsey's world, all of life is one of two things: strategy or organization.