Henry Mintzberg Quotes

The next move is always the test.

Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.

I seek out a lot of advice from other CEOs.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

Early in my career, I sometimes found it difficult to make the tough people decisions - I had to learn that. In business, you want to listen. You want to learn. You want to make sure you're not proceeding without information. But if you wait too long, you can actually hurt an organization even more.

If football taught me anything about business, it is that you win the game one play at a time.

This is a business. Be smart. Choose wisely.

In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.

Strategic planning is worthless - unless there is first a strategic vision.

Marketing is a very good thing, but it shouldn't control everything. It should be the tool, not that which dictates.

Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

The commander ought to lead every important movement.

I think a lot can be said for consolidation, but I think it should be done for the right reasons.

The way deals are done, every idea is looked at 50 different ways. Now, the market continues to change all the time. And we are always looking at everything in evaluating how it fits with our strategy.

Good captains know the strengths and weaknesses of their teams and make decisions accordingly.

I've had 20 years, 25 years of running business. I've been well trained by a number of amazing organizations and I've got a lot of implicit, subconscious pattern recognition on how to make business decisions.

As a manager, you need to have your own vision and what you want to do with the team.

Your job, as a head coach and general manager, is to listen and not bypass any opportunity to help your team improve.

Mediocre founders spend a lot of time talking about grand plans, but they never quite make a decision.

Hillary Clinton follows a cardinal rule in politics - don't commit to a decision before you have to.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

Life is a kind of chess.