David Brooks Quotes

Fail to plan, plan to fail.

Strategic planning is worthless - unless there is first a strategic vision.

Plan. Yes. Good idea. I should come up with a plan.

The real heart of strategy is the strategist.

It takes real planning to organize this kind of chaos.

Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.

I learned how to order my thoughts, and most important, learned how to develop a plan. I discovered the power of a plan. If you can plan it out, and it seems logical to you, you can do it. And that was the secret to success.

Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.

It doesn't always happen according to the way you have planned things out but I feel if you have covered most of the aspects, it does help out there in the middle.

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

Relying on luck … does not constitute a policy.

When you're as chaotic as I am, you need a very firm structure in your life.

This is something that baffles me about managers: if you know the formation that you will revert to if you are in trouble, why not start with it?

I like to plan. I like to see the future.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

Then you realize that the preparation and the planning of this small army of people trying to head to the single aim of creating a work that's going to excite people is very risky. Of course, the odds are that it's not going to work out because there are too many possibilities of it going wrong.

Let us not confuse objectives with methods. Too many so-called leaders of the nation fail to see the forest because of the trees. Too many of them fail to recognize the vital necessity of planning for definite objectives. True leadership calls for the setting forth of the objectives and the rallying of public opinion in support of these objectives.

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

Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential.

We've got to fool the fools, and plan the plans. We must rule the rules, got to stand the stands.

Always, Always have a plan

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.

I may say that this is the greatest factor: the way in which the expedition is equipped, the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order, luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time, this is called bad luck.

I never wanted to show up and just say, "Okay, what are we doing today? Let's wing it!"