Strategic Oversight Quotes

The operational tail will wag the intelligence dog. The top people will be forced to take up all their time in the direction of operations and will neglect intelligence.

Our biggest failure is our failure to see patterns.

You cannot manage an airline from a corner office in Willis Tower. That doesn't work. You've got to manage by walking around.

If I save this Army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.

An executive cannot gradually dismiss details. Business is made up of details and I notice that the chief executive who dismisses them is quite likely to dismiss his business. Success is the sum of detail. It might perhaps be pleasing to imagine oneself beyond detail and engaged only in great things, but as I have often observed, if one attends only to great things and lets the little things pass the great things become little; that is, the business shrinks.

The Chilcot report is damning. It exposes a litany of failures over a long period, including reliance on flawed intelligence assessments, lack of planning and insufficient foresight of obvious consequences. But the report also exposes a chilling lack of rigour and a political culture of deference.

The Iraq war was always a long shot. But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles, and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought.

There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their collapse. There is nobody we can't take down. The question is, what do you do with the power?

At Microsoft I had many years of experience and history and seeing connections. With my direct reports, the job at Microsoft was to delegate and then be able to properly review, but not to micromanage. To have a way of connecting and integrating without getting in the way.

The intelligence failures with respect to Iraq were massive and have damaged our credibility around the world.

Not only military leaders are sometimes guilty of designing a war as if it were a bridge that only spans half a river, civilian leaders may initiate military campaigns without being troubled by the fact that they have no plan to bring their war to a close.

I think having a visionary CEO is awesome, and visionary leadership is one thing, but you also need checks and balances on whether this company can withstand a very honest and critical look at itself.

My job as majority leader is be supportive of our troops, try to have input as decisions are made and to look at those decisions after they're made ... not to march in lock step with everything the president decides to do.

As commander I was responsible for the overall success of the mission, and so I had to know at least a little bit about everything.

I'm not too involved in day-to-day matters. I only supervise at the board level.

Remember Circuit City? Bear Stearns? Lehman Brothers? Sports Authority? Once, all were billion-dollar companies - then gone in a moment. The fatal problem might be fraud or corruption, but more often, it's simply that management didn't see 'over the other side of the hill.'

I see my role as police commissioner as providing strategic oversight, support and accountability for the bureau.

My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I don't take these things into consideration

When a general, unable to estimate the enemy's strength, allows an inferior force to engage a larger one, or hurls a weak detachment against a powerful one, and neglects to place picked soldiers in the front rank, the result must be rout.

The Administration has made critical mistakes and errors in judgment leading up to the war in Iraq. The President refuses to acknowledge these mistakes, and thus, no corrective action has been taken to prevent these problems from happening again.

Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you're working at the big picture but don't know the details.

History will show that perhaps we did not think through the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. But here we are.

In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption.

The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.

Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority. It wasn't like somebody told me about it and I said, "I don't know how to spell that." I said, "Yeah, I've got that on my list, so I'm okay." But there came a point when we realized it was happening faster and was a much deeper phenomenon than had been recognized in our strategy.