This Is Strategy Quotes

“A series of 17 questions shines a light on the work to be done. It brings tomorrow forward to today, right here and right now, allowing us to articulate a strategy. •  Who are we here to serve? •  What is the change we seek to make? • What are our resources? •  What is the genre we’re working in? •  Who has done something like this before me? • What systems are in play? • Am I changing someone’s status? •  Why would anyone voluntarily choose to be part of this work? •  What will they tell their colleagues? •  Who gains in status, affiliation and power by supporting this work? •  Will early support translate into more support later? • Where is the network effect? •  What do I need to learn to make this work? •  Who do I need to work with? •  Where is the dip and when should I quit? •  What will I do if it doesn’t work out? • How much is enough?”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Strategies start with decision-making and the decisions continue until we reach our goal or realize that we won’t be able to.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Rather than celebrate the paths not taken, we take no path at all. If you’re going to say “yes” to something, be prepared to show us all the things that you would have to say “no” to in order to make room.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“One reason that we avoid choosing a strategy is that we’re not comfortable walking away from all the other possible strategies.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“The scale of your project needs to match your assets. When we take on too big a change, for too many people, we underdeliver, and all is lost.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“It’s easier to help someone find what they want than it is to change what they want.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Change almost always involves a pivot. The change agent isn’t changing what the nodes in the system want—they’re changing how they get it.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Before we build a strategy toward better, we need to see the systems. Either we’re working the system or the system is working us.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Cooperation is the most often overlooked option. Alliances, networks and rewiring information flow create new opportunities because value is added, not simply captured.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“All resilient strategies are based on expanding our circles of us and of now.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Author adrienne maree brown encourages us to move at the speed of trust.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Improving the parts of the system doesn’t always improve the output of the system, because, as Russ Ackoff has written, the system is about the interconnections between the parts, not the parts themselves.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“A good idea isn’t based on what you would do if you could start over. A good idea is a series of leverage points and disruptions that would permit a change agent to create tension and opportunity that might bend a system in the right direction.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“The strategy we adopt has tension at its center. We’re not here to “do our job.” We’re here to make a change happen.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Effort is often part of our work, but effort by itself is not a strategy.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Culture defeats tactics every time, which is why strategy is often about creating culture.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“The builder creates a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional building. Unrolling the plans, she says, “This is what we will build.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“The Iroquois Confederacy lived by a simple principle: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“The business model is built on the traction of creating change. And change requires tension, scarcity and forward motion.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Creating the conditions for success is a very different project than finding a heroic move that saves the day.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“As Michael Porter has pointed out, a strategy isn’t a goal. And a strategy isn’t a list of tasks. A strategy is the set of choices we make (and stick with) as we seek to compete. Hard choices are easy to hide from, since choices feel risky. And competition is challenging. It’s easier to have a meeting about our mission statement than it is to get serious about choosing and persisting with a strategy.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Strategy is the hard work of choosing what to do today to improve our tomorrow.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Buckminster Fuller taught us that to fundamentally change something, we must build a new system that makes the existing system obsolete.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Don’t surrender your agency and revert to the numbing day-to-day grind of compliance. You can make things better.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Sooner or later we have to do our jobs, but it probably pays to focus on our work.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“The goal at the start is traction with a few, not perfection for the masses. Not only for a product, but for the work of a baker early in their career, or of a coach working their way up the ranks. And it’s particularly true for system change over time. The first examples are always thinly populated and imperfect. People who are finding traction rarely feel burned out. Burnout comes when our goals don’t align with our strategy. We hope for something that doesn’t arrive, waiting, apparently powerless, for the world to bring it to us.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“useful business model has a few attributes: •  It gets easier over time. Past success makes future success more likely. •  It’s a welcome contribution to the lives and projects of the people who are paying (in time or money) for the work. •  It’s resilient. When the world changes, the model adjusts and persists or even thrives. The tools of the internet have encouraged people”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Tasks fill our days, but strategies determine whether we’ve wasted our effort. Effort is often part of our work, but effort by itself is not a strategy.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“The best employers don’t recruit at the placement office, and the most worthwhile projects aren’t always obvious.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans

“Sometimes the best way to win is to help others succeed.”
― Seth Godin, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans