Strategic Clarity Quotes

Either Al Qaeda is a threat worth acting against or it is not. CIA leadership has to decide which it is and cease these bi-polar mood swings.

Where is Germany now and where does it want to go? It's a question being asked by our partners and allies abroad. We have to return - urgently - to our old dependability. We have to make clear for others what we stand for, where we're headed, and that we know where we belong.

I have yet to meet members of a leadership team who I thought lacked the intelligence or the domain expertise required to be successful. I've met many, however, who failed to foster organizational health. Their companies were riddled with politics, various forms of dysfunction, and general confusion about their direction and mission.

Starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses your mind in a way that running a multibillion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.

Capablanca possessed an amazing ability to quickly see into a position and intuitively grasp its main features. His style, one of the purest, most crystal-clear in the entire history of chess, astonishes one with his logic.

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.

We should not fight wars without a clearly defined end state... when you go to war, it can't be a half-step.

Having a clear mission and making sure you know that mission and making sure that mission comes through the company is probably the most important thing you can do for both culture and values.

The essence of Capablanca's greatness is his rare talent for avoiding all that can complicate or confuse the conflict.

My suggestion is that if you need someone outside your company to prepare a mission statement for you, then you really don't know what your mission is, and you probably don't have one.

He can be regarded as the great master of simplification. The art of resolving the tension at the critical moment and in the most effacious way so as to clarify the position as desired is Capablanca's own.

We have to be very clear with the population and the countries we enter what we can do and what we cannot do.

Politics abhors a rhetorical vacuum. If the president is not clear on his … strategy, foreign policy critics and political opponents will be happy to define it for him, using less than flattering language.

But the ability to articulate what you are doing, to be clear about it, and to stick to it is, I think, the essence of political leadership.

The United States, … and all civilized nations must have zero tolerance for terrorism. Otherwise, we sink into a swamp of moral relativism and strategic myopia.

The effective strategies in politics are ones that are so clear and obvious that people can grasp it.