Strategic Management: Strategy (Just the Quotes)

"Everything in strategy is very simple, but that does not mean everything is very easy." (Carl von Clausewitz, "On War", 1832)

"Strategy is a system of expedients. It is more than science, it is the translation of science into practical life, the development of an original leading thought in accordance with the ever-changing circumstances." (Helmuth von Moltke, "On Strategy", 1871) 

"Strategy is concerned with the setting of an aim and the forming of schemes. Tactics are concerned with the execution of the schemes. Strategy is abstract, tactics are concrete. Expressing it in a popular way: Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation." (Dr. Max Euwe, "Strategy & Tactices in chess", 1937)

"A policy therefore might be likened to strategy, the broad, overall, long term conception which gives direction and purpose to the tactics of immediately daily operations and decisions." (Lawrence K. Frank, "National Policy for the Family", 1948)

"A natural companion to the competitive advantage is the synergy component of strategy. This requires that opportunities within the scope possess characteristics which will enhance synergy." (Igor Ansoff, "Corporate Strategy", 1965) 

"The leading attempt at a complete normative theory of planning and resource allocation is provided by the concept of 'strategy'." (Joseph L Bower, "Managing the Resource Allocation Process", 1970)

"As in war, strategic success depends on tactical effectiveness, and no degree of planning can lessen management's tactical imperatives. The first responsibility of the executive, anyway, is to the here and now. If he makes a shambles of the present, there may be no future; and the real purpose of planning - the one whose neglect is common, but poisonous - is to safeguard and sustain the company in subsequent short-run periods." (Robert Heller, "The Naked Manager: Games Executives Play", 1972)

"'Structure follows strategy' is one of the fundamental insights we have acquired in the last twenty years. Without understanding the mission, the objectives, and the strategy of the enterprise, managers cannot be managed, organizations cannot be designed, managerial jobs cannot be made productive. [...] Strategy determines what the key activities are in a given business. And strategy requires knowing 'what our business is and what it should be'." (Peter F Drucker, "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices", 1973)

"Any approach to strategy quickly encounters a conflict between corporate objectives and corporate capabilities. Attempting the impossible is not good strategy; it is just a waste of resources." (Bruce Henderson, Henderson on Corporate Strategy, 1979)

"The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action, or strategy, from among the set of admissible strategies." (Richard A Epstein, "The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic", 1977)

"The corporation without an explicit strategy will fall into the hands of politicians." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)

"The essence of formulating strategy is relating a company to its environment." (Michael Porter, "Competitive Strategy", 1980)

"Coaching subordinates is a business strategy and one of the vital ways a manager makes things happen; not just in this accounting period, but over the long haul." (George S Odiorne, "How Managers Make Things Happen", 1982)

"In business as on the battlefield, the object of strategy is to bring about the conditions most favorable to one's own side, judging precisely the right moment to attack or withdraw and always assessing the limits of compromise correctly. Besides the habit of analysis, what marks the mind of the strategist is an intellectual elasticity or flexibility that enables him to come up with realistic responses to changing situations, not simply to discriminate with great precision among different shades of gray." (Kenichi Ohmae, "The Mind Of The Strategist", 1982)

"One important function of strategy is to counteract a tendency of professional managers to become too conservative and bureaucratic." (Boris Yavitz & William H Newman, "Strategy in Action, 1982)

"Without competitors there would be no need for strategy." (Kenichi Ohmae, "The Mind of the Strategist", 1982)

"Risk is a function of how poorly a strategy will perform if the 'wrong' scenario occurs." (Michael Porter, "Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance", 1985)

"Opportunities abound for linking productivity to business strategy." (John L Grahn, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"The opportunities and threats existing in any situation always exceed the resources needed to exploit the opportunities or avoid the threats. Thus, strategy is essentially a problem of allocating resources. If strategy is to be successful, it must allocate superior resources against a decisive opportunity." (William Cohen, "Winning on the Marketing Front: The corporate manager's game plan", 1986)

"View thinking as a strategy. Thinking is the best way to resolve difficulties. Maintain faith in your ability to think your way out of problems. Recognize the difference between worrying and thinking. The former is repeated, needless problem analysis while the latter is solution generation." (Timothy W Firnstahl, Harvard Business Review, 1986)

"All organizations engage in the three basic activities of strategy, tactics, and logistics. Strategy defines the job. Tactics does the job. Logistics provides the resources to get the job done - not only material resources, but also manpower, funds, and data." (Robert L Siegel, 1987)

"[Successful organizations] comprehend uncertainty. They set direction, not detailed strategy. They are the best strategists precisely because they are suspicious of forecasts and open to surprise. They think strategic planning is greatas long as no one takes the plans too seriously." (Robert H Waterman, "The Renewal Factor", 1987)

"Inertial pressures prevent most organizations from radically changing strategies and structures." (Michael T Hannan, "Organizational Ecology", 1989)

"It is possible to learn strategic flexibility [...] however, that it is difficult to teach it. It is not a matter of learning a few readily grasped general principles, but of learning a lot of small, 'local' rules, each of which is applicable in a limited area. The point is not to learn how to drive a steamroller with which one can flatten all problems in the same way, but to learn the adroitness of a puppeteer, who at one time holds many strings in his hands and who is able to adapt his movements to the given circumstances in the most sophisticated ways." (Dietrich Dörner, "The Logic of Failure", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (B), 1990)

"Strategy means abstract thinking and planning, as opposed to tactics, which are the individual operations used to implement strategy. Tactics are specific; strategy is general. Tactics tend to be immediate, strategy long-term." (Bruce Pandolfini, "Weapons of Chess: An omnibus of chess strategy", 1989)

"One of the issues involved in moving strategy making down into the business organization concerns common understanding or focus. To carry out tactics, we do not need to share common objectives. But with strategy, we must interpret conditions, events, and actions in a similar manner to have any hope of creating a successful plan." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"Sometimes strategies must be left as broad visions, not precisely articulated, to adapt to a changing environment." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning", Harvard Business Review, 1994) [source] 

"Strategy and tactics. Thinking and doing. Vision and execution. Whatever you call it, finding a balance between these two powerful forces of success remains a lifelong search for the best in any field: military leader, artist, baseball coach, or marketing manager." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations. […] Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving." (Henry Mintzberg, 1994)

"The key to strategy is the ability to think forward and reason backward. We imagine where the future will take us and then build a pathway back to today. The problem lies in not knowing which of many possible futures will unfold. A Decision Tree allows you to visualize these futures and evaluate their potential impact from the future, rather than from today." (Terry Richey, "The Marketer's Visual Tool Kit", 1994)

"[…] the most successful strategies are visions, not plans. Strategic planning isn’t strategic thinking. One is analysis, and the other is synthesis." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning", Harvard Business Review, 1994) [source] 

"A strategy is a set of hypotheses about cause and effect. The measurement system should make the relationships (hypotheses) among objectives (and measures) in the various perspectives explicit so that they can be managed and validated. The chain of cause and effect should pervade all four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"But the essence of strategy is in the activities – choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals. Otherwise, a strategy is nothing more than a marketing slogan that will not withstand competition." (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Commonly, the threats to strategy are seen to emanate from outside a company because of changes in technology or the behavior of competitors. Although external changes can be the problem, the greater threat to strategy often comes from within. A sound strategy is undermined by a misguided view of competition, by organizational failures, and, especially, by the desire to grow." (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Managers must clearly distinguish operational effectiveness from strategy. Both are essential, but the two agendas are different. The operational agenda involves continual improvement everywhere there are no trade-offs. Failure to do this creates vulnerability even for companies with a good strategy. The operational agenda is the proper place for constant change, flexibility, and relentless efforts to achieve best practice. In contrast, the strategic agenda is the right place for defining a unique position, making clear trade-offs, and tightening fit. It involves the continual search for ways to reinforce and extend the company’s position. The strategic agenda demands discipline and continuity; its enemies are distraction and compromise." (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Organizations need the capacity for double-loop learning. Double-loop learning occurs when managers question their underlying assumptions and reflect on whether the theory under which they were operating remains consistent with current evidence, observations, and experience. Of course, managers need feedback about whether their planned strategy is being executed according to plan-the single-loop learning process. But even more important, they need feedback about whether the planned strategy remains a viable and successful strategy - the double-loop learning process. Managers need information so that they can question whether the fundamental assumptions made when they launched the strategy are valid." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "The Balanced Scorecard", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Strategy is creating fit among a company’s activities. The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well - not just a few - and integrating among them. If there is no fit among activities, there is no distinctive strategy and little sustainability. Management reverts to the simpler task of overseeing independent functions, and operational effectiveness determines an organization’s relative performance."  (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"Strategy renders choices about what not to do as important as choices about what to do. Indeed, setting limits is another function of leadership. Deciding which target group of customers, varieties, and needs the company should serve is fundamental to developing a strategy. But so is deciding not to serve other customers or needs and not to offer certain features or services. Thus strategy requires constant discipline and clear communication. Indeed, one of the most important functions of an explicit, communicated strategy is to guide employees in making choices that arise because of trade-offs in their individual activities and in day-to-day decisions." (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness. Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different. Operational effectiveness is about things that you really shouldn't have to make choices on; it's about what's good for everybody and about what every business should be doing."  (Michael E Porter, "What is Strategy?", Harvard Business Review, 1996)

"You can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version. You need to draw on your experience [...] you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product or technology." (Andy Grove, 1996)

"Senior management needed to step in and make some very tough moves. [...] we also realized then that there must be a better way to formulate strategy. What we needed was a balanced interaction between the middle managers, with their deep knowledge but narrow focus, and senior management, whose larger perspective could set a context." (Andrew Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, 1998)

"Strategy maps show the cause-and effect links by which specific improvements create desired outcomes [...] From a larger perspective, strategy maps show how an organization will convert its initiatives and resources - including intangible assets such as corporate culture and employee knowledge - into tangible outcomes." (Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, "Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It", Harvard Business Review, 2000)

"The difference between strategy and tactics is that tactics get you down to the 'nitty-gritty' details of exactly how you are going to do the work." (James P Lewis, "Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control" 3rd Ed., 2001)

"[...] a general-purpose universal optimization strategy is theoretically impossible, and the only way one strategy can outperform another is if it is specialized to the specific problem under consideration." Yu-Chi Ho & David L Pepyne, "Simple explanation of the no-free-lunch theorem and its implications", Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications 115, 2002)

"Strategic modeling discovers what areas of the business need to be developed if the company is going to implement its corporate strategy." (Alan Chmura & J Mark Heumann, "Logical Data Modeling: What it is and How to do it", 2005)

"Strategy is about stretching limited resources to fit ambitious aspirations." (Coimbatore K Prahalad, "Don Soderquist", 2005)

"Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes." (Henry Mintzberg, "Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Mangement", 2005)

"Businesses are themselves a form of design. The design of a business encompasses its strategy, organizational structure, management processes, culture, and a host of other factors. Business designs evolve over time through a process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, with the market as the ultimate arbiter of fitness [...] the three-way coevolution of physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs…accounts for the patterns of change and growth we see in the economy." (Eric D Beinhocker, "The Origin of Wealth. Evolution, complexity, and the radical remaking of economics", 2006)

"Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term, which achieves advantage in a changing environment through its configuration of resources and competences with the aim of fulfilling stakeholder expectations." (G Johnson et al, "Exploring corporate strategy: text and cases" 8th Ed., 2007)

"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, "Tracking Strategies: Toward a General Theory", 2007) 

"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 will go out of business." (Bill Gates, "Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy", 2009)

"Strategy is a constant reconciling of possibilities, means and ends." (Bernard Jenkin, 2010)

"A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge. It is not defined by the pay grade of the person authorizing the action." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"Any strategy that involves crossing a valley - accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance - will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done." (Neal Stephenson, "Innovation Starvation," World Policy Journal, 2011)

"Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, 'vision', planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy", 2011) 

"First develop a strategy that utilizes everything around you. The best way to prepare for a challenge is to cultivate the ability to call on an infinite variety of responses." (Paulo Coelho, "Aleph", 2011)

"The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"When organizations are unable to make new strategies - when people evade the work of choosing among different paths in the future - then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership's insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)

"An organization's strategy is simply its plan for success. It's nothing more than the collection of intentional decisions a company makes to give itself the best chance to thrive and differentiate from competitors." (Patrick Lencioni, "The Advamtage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business", 2012)

"The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people." (John Kotter, "The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations", 2012)

"By and large, strategy comes into play when there is actual or potential conflict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required." (Lawrence Freedman, “Strategy: A history”, 2013)

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while strategy is undoubtedly a good thing to have, it is a hard thing to get right. […] So what turns something that is not quite strategy into strategy is a sense of actual or imminent instability, a changing context that induces a sense of conflict. Strategy therefore starts with an existing state of affairs and only gains meaning by an awareness of how, for better or worse, it could be different." (Lawrence Freedman, “Strategy: A history”, 2013)

"You can only look so far, and so you better just keep looking frequently. That’s the most important element of strategy: You understand the direction you’re going, but you also know what you’re going to do in the next six months. Most companies will do a pretty good job many times about the direction, but then they never break it down to shorter metrics. Intel did a super job on that. When you ask why [we] succeeded, this is one of the reasons." (Les Vadasz, 2013)

"Any chief executive who hires a consultant to give them strategy should be fired." (Duff McDonald, "The Firm", 2014)

"Strategy is concerned with an organisation's direction for the future; its purpose, its ambitions, its resources and how it interacts with the environment in which it operates." (Peter Lake & Robert Drake, "Information Systems Management in the Big Data Era", 2014)

"A strategy that doesn't take into account resources is doomed to failure." (John C Maxwell, "JumpStart Your Thinking: A 90-Day Improvement Plan", 2015)

"Business strategy comes first. IT can be aligned with business provided that business strategy is commonly understood and accepted. Sometimes, this first step itself is a hurdle. Business strategy may exist in the heads of the execs but it may not be articulated or shared beyond vision, mission, and a plan for the year." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"Change strategy is, by this definition, the way a business (1) manages the portfolio of change to make sure that the parts deliver the whole business strategy, (2) creates the context for change, and (3) monitors change risk and change performance across the entire business." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change",  2015)

"In business, as in game theory and chess, all great strategies start with a vision of the future. In one sense, the recipe is simple: it should include a sense of where the organization should go, what customers are likely to pay for, and how the organization can offer a unique product or service that customers will buy. The devil, of course, lies in the details." (David B Yoffie & Michael A Cusumano, "Strategy Rules", 2015)

"Master strategists understand that day-to-day tactical decisions are just as important as big competitive moves. Strategy creates the playing field; tactics define how you play the game - and ultimately whether you win or survive to play another day." (David B Yoffie & Michael A Cusumano, "Strategy Rules", 2015)

"One way of managing complexity is to constrain the freedom of the parts: to hold some of those nonlinear interactions still. Businesses accomplish this with tight rules, processes, hierarchies, policies, and rigid strategies. Gathering people together under a corporate roof reduces complexity by constraining individual autonomy. The upside, of course, is collaboration, alignment of goals, and faster exchange of information." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change",  2015)

"Strategic coherence is more important than strategic precision in an uncertain world. It is impossible to get everything right because of market volatility, but we can ensure strategies do not collide. In large, complex organizations where many executives are empowered to launch major change, strategic incoherence can be a big problem." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change",  2015)

"Strategy is ineffective if it cannot be articulated in terms of day-to-day tradeoffs." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"Strategy is not for the faint of heart. Great strategists do the non-obvious, the difficult, and the counterintuitive in order to alter the competitive landscape in their favor. Often this means making big bets, whether in the form of huge financial commitments or competitive gambits, such as an all-out attack on the leaders in the field. The scale of these gambles may intimidate colleagues and partners as well as the competition. When executed skillfully, however, they deliver suitably outsized rewards." (David B Yoffie & Michael A Cusumano, "Strategy Rules", 2015)

"Strategy that takes no account of tactical practicalities is doomed, and great tactics without strategy produce incoherence and nonalignment. Despite this, the strategy-tactics dialogue happens too rarely in organizations." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change",  2015)

"Thinking strategically is the fun part of business. Great strategists think big thoughts about the purpose of their enterprises, the long-run visions for their firms, the big bets they plan to make, and the products, platforms, and ecosystems they hope to build. But it is not enough to think big thoughts. To become a great strategist, you must turn your vision and high-level ideas into tactics, actions, and organizations that reach the customer and fend off the competition." (David B Yoffie & Michael A Cusumano, "Strategy Rules", 2015)

"Somebody once told me, 'Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.' What's the top line? It's things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What's our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on." (Steve Jobs, "Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs", 2016)

"Every strategy starts with a set of problems to be solved. The strategy itself is the set of solutions to those problems. A Logic Tree is the critical starting point for any strategy. It ensures you have defined the problem correctly and helps you enumerate the best strategic solutions." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"[...] strategy is about determining the problems and opportunities in front of you, defining them properly, and shaping a course of action that will give your business the greatest advantage. Balancing problem solving with creating and exploiting new opportunities through imagination and analysis is the cornerstone of a great strategy." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)

"Strategy is the cornerstone of the organization design process. If the strategy is not clear, or not agreed upon by the leadership team, there are no criteria on which to base other design decisions. Without knowing the goal, it is impossible to make rational choices along the way." (Jay R Galbraith et al, "Designing Dynamic Organizations", 2022)

"The strategy determines what types of skills, competencies, and other capabilities are required of employees and managers." (Jay R Galbraith et al, "Designing Dynamic Organizations", 2022)

"Strategy is a style of thinking, a conscious and deliberate process, an intensive implementation system, the science of insuring future success." (Pete Johnson)

"Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation." (Max Euwe)

"The normal 'cascade' strategy for implementing change is usually ineffective, because memories remain embedded in the way the organization works after the change. This applies particularly if the change relates to the culture rather than to work practices or systems." (Dick Beckhard)