Big Picture Thinking Quotes

In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.

The big, fun, ambitious ideas tend to come out of the frustration of talking for too long about the smaller, weaselly ones.

Looking at small advantages prevents great affairs from being accomplished.

Too many politicians are shifting the critical themes of our national conversations from a 'big ideas' American Brand Platform to narrowly focused, polarizing sound bites that put party philosophy before what used to be heralded as the common good. These ideas, more often than not, divide us rather than serve to bind us.

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

Why shoot for the moon? It matters because when you try to do something radically hard, you approach the problem differently than when you try to make something incrementally better.

We never try to think in terms of any competitive product or company. If you do that, you just focus on a certain narrow area. Rather, we should think much more broadly.

I am a bigger-picture manager because I've lived through something that's a big picture.

I perceive myself as rather uninhibited, with a certain mathematical facility and more interest in the broad aspect of a problem than the delicate nuances. I am more interested in discovering what is over the next rise than in assiduously cultivating the beautiful garden close at hand.

As leaders, we become whole when we see that our focused, singular commitment to making the numbers and the metrics cannot be effective on its own, but only when it is part of the whole picture - only when we see that it takes more than metrics to make up the whole.

We need people who can see straight ahead and deep into the problems. Those are the experts. But we also need peripheral vision and experts are generally not very good at providing peripheral vision.

The problem with Indians is that we have lost the habit of thinking big!

I was a better builder than a manager. I'd rather focus on maximizing the opportunities swinging for the fences than minimizing the risk with bunts and singles.

It takes the same effort to think small than to think big. But to think big frees you from the insignificant details.

It's definitely important to have a vision, to have kind of a sense of what might be possible, but not to be dogmatic about your beliefs about the way something has to be done.

I don't have a directorial overview, which sometimes is very helpful.

We are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams.

We now need to look beyond our immediate future and aim higher and farther.

It's kind of hard for you to be doing huge things and still be knowing what's happening on the street level.

If you just focus on the smallest details, you never get the big picture right.

His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

I used to have this debate with Steve Jobs, and he would always say, 'You guys are doing too much stuff.' He did a good job of doing one or two things really well. We'd like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.

I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan.

Strategy must dominate tactics, not the other way around.

I don't think as big and as creative as Joss.