Henry Mintzberg Quotes

The real heart of strategy is the strategist.

I've always been kind of a strategic thinking person - I love sports for instance, but my interest in sports is 'cause I love watching strategy in action or playing it. I'm not into the drama so much, of the physical action. I'm interested in the coach and how he's strategizing.

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

If you don't have a viable strategy, you will be defeated by someone who does.

Without a correct strategy the victory is impossible. But even the most correct strategy cannot give the victory under unfavorable objective conditions.

Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.

We have zero strategic thinking out of our White House. And we have a national security structure that has lost its way when it comes to strategic thinking and strategic decision-making.

Strategic plans cause more dumb decisions than anything else in America.

Strategists who don’t take time to think are just planners.

You make the right decision for the long run. You manage for the long run, and you continue to move to higher value. That's what I think my job is.

I think almost all strategic problems could at least be improved upon if people would do more careful game-theoretic analysis. The reason game theory works in predicting is because people intuit how to behave game-theoretically.

Everything in strategy is very simple, but that does not mean everything is very easy.

Life is a kind of chess.

Chess demands total concentration

Even the best team, without a sound plan, can't score.

Strategy is all very well, but it pays to give thought from time to time to the results.

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.

The two most fundamental strategic choices are deciding where to play and how to win.

Hope is not strategy. Hope fits with vision, but we must have a strategy and a process to make our vision become a reality.

If it's a principle, it's a winner. If it's a tactic, it's a loser.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

People who are reading my books, or who are thinking about it, have some general idea about the concept of strategy. They're better off than somebody that has none. So I would never say it's useless.

Even though plans themselves are worthless, the exercise of planning is very valuable and totally missing in most startups today.

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations

"What would I do if?.." By thinking tactically, we can more easily arrive at correct tactical solutions, and practice - even theoretical practice - tends to produce confidence in our solutions which, in turn, makes it easier for us, and thus quicker, to reach a decision.