Karl Schroeder Quotes

Prudence is foresight and far-sightedness. It's the ability to make immediate decisions on the basis of their longer-range effects.

We have to always look ahead enough moves to be well prepared, even for victory!

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.

You have to make smart decisions, but you never know what will happen in the future.

To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.

The real trick in life is to turn hindsight into foresight that reveals insight.

My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.

It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.

Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.

We can't continue to always base our strategy on the fact that the other guy is going to mess up all the time.

The challenge of our times is to leave nothing to chance.

In the business world, if you're not looking ahead, you're missing something.

I always say that my job is not to think about today. My job is to look around the corner and feel and see what's coming, and then warn everybody else.

Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.

What is certain about the future is that even the best efforts to predict the conditions of future war will prove erroneous. What is important, however, is to not be so far off the mark that visions of the future run counter to the very nature of war and render American forces unable to adapt to unforeseen challenges.

Strategy is, at some level, the ability to predict what's going to happen, but it's also about understanding the context in which it is being formulated. And then you have to be open-minded to the fact that you're not going to get it right at the very beginning.

Look several months ahead, see where the obstacles lie, and figure out ways to overcome them.

My job is to make sure a client doesn't have any 'what if's - to make sure, when you look back, you don't say, 'What if I had done this? What if I had done that?'

I know I made plenty of mistakes in my tenure. But one of the things that you learn is to be very careful and to protect yourself down the road a little bit, which is to say you've got to think ahead and think where is the story going to go? What are all the possible outcomes? And how do I protect the president from unexpected twists and turns in the road?

He who fails to plan is planning to fail.

It is better to anticipate than to react.