The Art of Action Quotes

“If…there is a conflict between structure and strategy, the structure will win.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“In any case, a leader who believes that he can make a positive difference through continual personal interventions is usually deluding himself. He thereby takes over things other people are supposed to be doing, effectively dispensing with their efforts, and multiplies his own tasks to such an extent that he can no longer carry them all out. The demands made on a senior commander are severe enough as it is. It is far more important that the person at the top retains a clear picture of the overall situation than whether some particular thing is done this way or that.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Do not try to predict the effects your actions will have, because you can’t. Instead, encourage people to adapt their actions to realize the overall intention as they observe what is actually happening. Give them boundaries which are broad enough to take decisions for themselves and act on them.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“If Clausewitz is right, no one should develop a strategy without taking into account the effects of organizational friction. Yet we continue to be surprised and frustrated when it manifests itself. We tend to think everything has gone wrong when in fact everything has gone normally.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“What cannot be made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Having worked out what matters most now, pass the message on to others and give them responsibility for carrying out their part in the plan. Keep it simple. Don’t tell people what to do and how to do it. Instead, be as clear as you can about your intentions. Say what you want people to achieve and, above all, tell them why. Then ask them to tell you what they are going to do as a result.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“If company objectives are in conflict with personal ones, only one of them will win. Either the employees leave the company (as regularly happens in the most obvious form of conflict – forced redundancy) or the strategy will be sabotaged, consciously or unconsciously.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results

“Understanding gets compliance. Only belief gets commitment.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results

“What matters about creating alignment around a strategy is not the volume of communication, but its quality and precision.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results

“Strategy is about fighting the right battles, the important ones you are likely to win. Operations are about winning them.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“There was a history of entrepreneurialism, but it was getting them nowhere. In fact, it was making things worse. They needed to leverage their scale globally, but as long as country managers were calling the shots and demanding scarce technical resources from the center to fix trivial local problems, the fundamental need for a new technology platform could never be addressed. To hell with entrepreneurialism; it was just an excuse for selfishness and waste.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“The big issue was not strategy but executing strategy. There was plenty of activity, but not much action.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Sins of omission should be regarded as far more serious than sins of commission,”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“The Origins and Development of the Spirit of the Prussian Officer,” he tells the story of a staff officer dutifully carrying out an order without question, only to be pulled up short by a high-ranking general with the words: “The King made you a staff officer because you should know when not to obey.” In contrast to other European officer corps, Prince Friedrich Karl comments, the Prussians do not allow themselves to be hemmed in with rules and regulations, but give rein to the imagination and exploit every opportunity opened up by unexpected success. Such behavior would not be possible if senior commanders were to demand full control over every unit.10”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“A Prussian officer was expected to share a set of core values, defining his “honor,” which took precedence over an order. If he acted in accordance with honor – or, as we might more commonly say today, with integrity – disobedience was legitimate. The right talent and the right behavioral biases were put in place as a first step.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Internal friction is exacerbated by the fact that in business as in war, we are operating in a nonlinear, semi-chaotic environment in which our endeavors will collide and possibly clash with the actions of other independent wills (customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators, lobbyists, and so on). The internal and external worlds are in constant contact and the effects of our actions are the result of their reciprocal interaction. Friction gives rise to three gaps: the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap. To execute effectively, we must address all three. Our instinctive reaction to the three gaps is to demand more detail. We gather more data in order to craft more detailed plans, issue more detailed instructions, and exercise more detailed control. This not only fails to solve the problem, it usually makes it worse. We need to think about the problem differently and adopt a systemic approach to solving it.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“A survey conducted by the University of Michigan in 2005 identifies a range of barriers to execution, first among which is the “past/habits” of the organization.38 In most cases the underlying problem was attributed to “leadership.” The respondents’ view was that the solution was to focus on alignment. The survey’s author questions this, suggesting that although we put a lot of effort into developing and communicating strategy, “what we do not do is anticipate that things will change.”39”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“the gap between promises and results,” which it claims is itself a result of “the gap between what a company’s leaders want to achieve and the ability of their organization to achieve it”; that is, the alignment gap – getting the organization to do what its leaders want.35”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“And even if we make good plans based on the best information available at the time and people do exactly what we plan, the effects of our actions may not be the ones we wanted because the environment is nonlinear and hence is fundamentally unpredictable. As time passes the situation will change, chance events will occur, other agents such as customers or competitors will take actions of their own, and we will find that what we do is only one factor among several which create a new situation.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Today, there is a whole realm of scientific endeavor called nonlinear dynamics with mathematical foundations. It has been known since 1975, rather misleadingly, as “chaos theory.” Systems are nonlinear when the state they are in at a given point in time provides the input to a feedback mechanism which determines the new state of the system. Some such systems are sensitively dependent on the starting state. If so, future states are unpredictable. Such systems are called “chaotic.” The term is misleading because their states are not random, merely unknowable.26 Only recent increases in computing power have enabled scientists and mathematicians to grasp their behavior.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Clausewitz’s account contains another insight: that organizations are made up of people. If this should seem obvious, the implications of acknowledging it are not. In contrast to those of the scientific school like von Bülow, Clausewitz includes psychological factors in his basic account of war, and regards them as an inherent source of friction. Not only is an army not a “well-oiled machine,” the machine generates resistance of its own, because the parts it is made of are human. Although Clausewitz’s metaphors are all taken from mechanics rather than biology, he clearly sees where the metaphor itself begins to break down. He is reaching toward the idea of the organization as an organism. While the scientific school sought to eliminate human factors to make the organization as machine-like as possible, Clausewitz sought to exploit them.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Interestingly, when illustrating what he means by friction, Clausewitz does not use a military example at all, but chooses instead to describe a man setting out on a journey: Imagine a traveler who decides toward the evening to cover a further two stages on his day’s journey, some four or five hours’ ride with post-horses along the main highway; nothing very much. Then when he comes to the first stage he discovers that there are no horses, or only poor ones; then a mountainous area and ruined tracks; it gets dark, and after all his trials he is mightily pleased to reach the final stage and get some miserable roof over his head. So it is that in war, through an accumulation of innumerable petty circumstances which could never be taken into account on paper, everything deteriorates and you find that you are far from achieving your goal.16”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“it is these miracles of execution,” Clausewitz writes, “that we should really admire.”9 The fact is that in war “things do not happen of their own accord like a well-oiled machine, indeed the machine itself starts to create resistance, and overcoming it demands enormous willpower on the part of the leader.”10 In war, “everything is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult… taking action in war is movement in a resistant medium.”11”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“… organizations are made up of people. If this should seem obvious, the implications of acknowledging it are not.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“We are extraordinarily reluctant to admit that luck plays a part in business success.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Budgets were originally designed as control mechanisms. As such they are traps …”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“Combat is an interaction between human organisations. It is adversarial, highly dynamic, complex and lethal. It is grounded in individual and collective human behaviour, and conducted between organisations that are themselves complex. It is not determined, hence uncertain, and evolutionary. Critically, and to an extent in a way which we currently overlook, combat is fundamentally a human activity.12”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“In an unpredictable environment, this approach quickly falters. The longer and more rigorously we persist with it, the more quickly and completely things will break down. The environment we are in creates gaps between plans, actions, and outcomes: The gap between plans and outcomes concerns knowledge: It is the difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know. It means that we cannot create perfect plans. The gap between plans and actions concerns alignment: It is the difference between what we would like people to do and what they actually do. It means that even if we encourage them to switch off their brains, we cannot know enough about them to program them perfectly. The gap between actions and outcomes concerns effects: It is the difference between what we hope our actions will achieve and what they actually achieve. We can never fully predict how the environment will react to what we do. It means that we cannot know in advance exactly what outcomes the actions of our organization are going to create.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“In a stable, predictable environment it is possible to make quite good plans by gathering and analyzing information. We can learn enough about the outside world and our position in it to set some objectives. We know enough about the effects any actions will have to be able to work out what to do to achieve the objectives. We can then use a mixture of supervision, controls, and incentives to coerce, persuade, or cajole people into doing what we want. We can measure the results until the outcomes we want are achieved. We can make plans, take actions, and achieve outcomes in a linear sequence with some reliability. If we are assiduous enough, pay attention to detail, and exercise rigorous control, the sequence will be seamless.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

“At least since the time of In Search of Excellence in 1980, its first blockbuster bestseller, management literature has rejected the model of a business organization as a machine and its people as robots. Managers are exhorted to stop managing and start leading, to empower people, and to master something called “change management.” The volume of the volumes has become cacophonous. However, many managers remain rather confused, as there is little consensus about how empowerment is actually supposed to work.”
― Stephen Bungay, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results