Max McKeown Quotes

Without organization and leadership toward a realistic goal, there is no chance of realizing more than a small percentage of your potential.

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations

Fail to plan, plan to fail.

You need to be uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success.

Everyone in a successful organization must be willing and ready to risk. Risk is like change; it's not a choice.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

He who fails to plan is planning to fail.

Whatever you shoot is dead for a while before it starts to stink. The same goes for strategies. How many organizations carry this dead thing around with them, unaware of its irrelevancy until it is too late?

We have to have better intelligence. We have to have better interdiction capabilities. And so the issue is not how much we spend or how hard we try; the issue is are we doing it the right way? Are we being smart about it?

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

Always have a plan and believe in it. I tell my coaches not to compromise. Nothing good happens by accident. There must be a plan for everything and the plan will prevent you from overlooking little things. By having that plan, you'll be secure and self-doubts will never become a factor.

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

Delegation requires the willingness to pay for short term failures in order to gain long term competency.

The ability to manage well doesn't make much difference if you're not even in the right jungle.

There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.

In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.

Organize and execute around priorities.

Lack of planning is the cause of most failures.

You have to have a plan, or else you're just creating a recipe for chaos.

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

The risk of a business being hit by a low probability, high impact event is far higher than most boards realize because the number of potential wild cards is so great.

The organizations of the future are filled with smart, fast, flexible people on a mission

Taking smart risks can be very gratifying.

The successful leader must plan his work and work his plan.

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.