Total Competition: Lessons in Strategy from Formula One

by Ross Brawn

So if you recognize in yourself that you are lazy, then having that structure, committing to it, and making sure it happens, is vital.

if you could be a good bloke to work for in a professional sense – not just nice to have a beer with but in a professional sense – you would attract the best people. You could go and talk to good people and have a chance of persuading them to join your team. If you were flaky and hadn’t created the right reputation, then it is so much more difficult to build a solid and successful engineering team.

If you keep piling in the resource on the problem you have today and never allowing some resource to go into the future, then you will never have that future.

Human beings deal very badly with success. As they deal very badly with power and money.

if you want to be ultimately successful you have to build trusting relationships.

You have got to create the right environment, right people, right resources, give them the vision. Manage it as it goes along, do regular reviews. But it’s a process.

give people what you are trying to achieve and let them work it out

You have to build systems that are robust in good times and bad, especially when you operate in cyclical or highly competitive environments

there is a need for both compassion and discipline in leadership:

leaders need to focus more on process and less on diving into content.

Strategy is a process by which we overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. I emphasize, it is not a plan, it is a process.

This is why strategy has three dimensions (social, economic and technical);