Ten Great Strategy Management Quotes

As is our custom this time of year, we offer you our top ten strategy quotes for you to reflect on.  We wish you all a healthy and prosperous New Year! 

1. “Strategy management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques.  It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action.”
Peter Drucker, Management Consultant, Educator & Author

2.  “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”    
Jack Welch, former Chairman & CEO of General Electric

3. “When people evade the work of choosing among different paths into the future—then you get vague mom-and-apple-pie goals that everyone can agree on. Such goals are direct evidence of leadership’s insufficient will or political power to make or enforce hard choices. Put differently, universal buy-in usually signals the absence of choice.”
Richard P. Rumelt, Author of Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

4. “Designing a winning strategy is the art of asking questions.  Experimenting and then constantly renewing the thinking process by questioning the answers.  No matter how good today’s strategy is you must always keep reinventing it.”
Constantinos Markides, Author of All The Right Moves

5. “Overcoming complacency is crucial at the start of any change process, and it often requires a little bit of surprise, something that grabs attention at more than an intellectual level.  You need to surprise people with something that disturbs their view that everything is perfect.” 
John Kotter, Author of Leading Change and Our Iceberg is Melting

6. “The relevant question is not simply what shall we do tomorrow, but rather what shall we do today in order to get ready for tomorrow?”
Peter Drucker, Management Consultant, Educator & Author

7. “The best kind of accountability on a team is peer-to-peer. Peer pressure is more efficient and effective than going to the leader, anonymously complaining, and having them stop what they are doing to intervene.”
Patrick Lencioni, Author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

8. “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”
Stephen Covey, Educator, Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

9. “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Michael E. Potter, Author of The Competitive Advantage of Nations

10. “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first, and then seek to win.”
Sun Tzu, Chinese General, Military Strategies & Philosopher