Reactive Approach Quotes

When there is an influenza threat, drop everything and focus on risks from influenza pandemics. When SARS spreads, focus on unknown respiratory diseases. This approach helps to quell public concern, but it's a hugely inefficient way to deal with future risks.

Act first, explain later.

I don't like to guess. Just react. Some guys are guess hitters. I just could never do it. If you guess and guess wrong, you have no shot of hitting anything else.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.

I believe that everyone chooses how to approach life. If you're proactive, you focus on preparing. If you're reactive, you end up focusing on repairing.

No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance.

We have no strategy. It is the government that sets the strategy. All we can do it try and figure out what the government will do.

You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it.

There's an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

We spend a lot of money fixing things after they're broken.

We solve last year's problems without thinking about the future.

We have to let our defense dictate our offense.

That's part of the policy: To keep switching gears.

If I start planning then that's dangerous because then I have a target that I'm blinkered towards and I won't listen to the warning signs quite so much. I'd rather be in shape and then look around and say there's a race next week and jump into that than have it planned.

It's easier for me to let the game just come to me.

There has never been a master plan. Anyone who wanted to do it, we fired because it takes on a life of its own and doesn't cover new reality. We want people taking into account new information.

I'm just going to play whatever game is in front of me.

I'm not one of those politicians, to my probably discredit, who thinks very far ahead. It has to feel right to me and not be about a careful plot and plan.

The biggest mistake is an over-reliance on data. Managers will say if there are no data they can take no action. However, data only exist about the past. By the time data become conclusive, it is too late to take actions based on those conclusions.

I don't really have a method or a technical process. I studied [Sanford] Meisner, and that's the thing that really works for me. That sort of instinctual, in the moment, what the other actors do, working off them and letting the story unfold, as opposed to having an idea of what the story should be.

I always try to go in there and stick to my base, which is the defensive end, and then just let the offense come to me.

You can't lay back and wait for somebody else to do it. And I think if the president's made a mistake here, it's this laid-back kind of approach where he's waiting for someone else to solve the problem.

Preventive policies are greatly superior to reactive ones.

We fix symptoms but almost never deal with the underlying cause. We put out fires but we don’t prevent them.