Strategy Quotes

429 Sourced quotes

People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Students of the Ichi school Way of strategy should train from the start with the sword and long sword in either hand. This is the truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon yet undrawn.

Miyamoto Musashi

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

Lois McMaster Bujold

The essence of the phenomenon of gambling is decision making. The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action, or strategy, from among the set of admissible strategies.

Richard Arnold Epstein

I have been many years training in the Way of strategy, called Ni Ten Ichi Ryu, and now I think I will explain it in writing for the first time.

Miyamoto Musashi

My budget nearly doubles funding for a sustained strategy of homeland security, focused on four key areas: bioterrorism, emergency response, airport and border security, and improved intelligence. We will develop vaccines to fight anthrax and other deadly diseases. We'll increase funding to help states and communities train and equip our heroic police and firefighters. We will improve intelligence collection and sharing, expand patrols at our borders, strengthen the security of air travel, and use technology to track the arrivals and departures of visitors to the United States.

The real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation.

Henry Mintzberg

Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.

There is an emerging alternative to the big government-big business-big labor kind of "rebuilding" of America. Its basic strategy is to get investment capital out of the hands of the big banks... and into the hands of the communities. Its greatest champions are neither politicians nor oppositional political groups, but – remarkably – bankers; or, more specifically, those few bankers who describe themselves as "community development bankers."

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by... Herbert Simon... to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough.... Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior... we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

Somewhere around 1945 we began to loot the future as a strategy for survival, some ethical norm was shattered.

Terence McKenna

Low cost relative to competitors becomes the theme running through the entire strategy, though quality, service and other areas cannot be ignored.

The episode in Sodom is undoubtedly the earliest account in human history of the entrapment of homosexuals, a strategy widely practiced by the law enforcement agencies of modern Western countries, especially those of the United States. In effect, the men of Sodom were entrapped by two strangers, who in truth were not travelers but angels, that is to say, God's plain-clothesmen. These agents of the Biblical vice-squad wasted no time punishing the offenders.

Basketball is a great mystery. You can do everything right. You can have the perfect mix of talent and the best system of offense in the game. You can devise a foolproof defensive strategy and prepare your players for every possible eventuality. But if the players don't have a sense of oneness as a group, your efforts won't pay off. And the bond that unites a team can be so fragile, so elusive.

In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each...

Stephen Jay Gould

Do you believe in what you do? Every day? It turns out that belief happens to be a brilliant strategy.

It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or withhold the equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by to work out its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.

Thorstein Veblen

My strategy has always been do something that is hard to follow.

There is only one form of political strategy in which I have any confidence, and that is to try to do the right thing and sometimes be able to succeed.

Calvin Coolidge

As part of the National Strategy, the Government should commit itself to the virtual elimination of functional illiteracy and innumeracy.

Claus Moser, Baron Moser

Obviously my best strategy is to wait, listen, and learn.

Risk is a function of how poorly a strategy will perform if the 'wrong' scenario occurs.

Strategy is about stretching limited resources to fit ambitious aspirations.

Many things can cause a loss of balance. One cause is danger, another is hardship, and another is surprise. You must research this.
In large-scale strategy it is important to cause loss of balance. Attack without warning where the enemy is not expecting it, and while his spirit is undecided follow up your advantage and, having the lead, defeat him.

Miyamoto Musashi

Animal behavior has evolved to battle parasites. In fact, we have parasites to thank for the existence of sex. Sex is a costly and time-consuming method of reproduction. Experiments have shown that, in the absence of parasites, species evolve toward parthenogenesis—or cloning—as the reproductive method of choice. In parthenogenesis each individual is able to self-replicate. But this produces almost no genetic variation. In the presence of parasites, cloning, while more energy-efficient, is not a viable reproductive strategy. It presents a stationary genetic target to parasites, who, once introduced into such a system, will quickly dominate it....