strategic resilience Quotes

Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he's lost the battle.

Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.

One lesson is to not to play desperately if your position is worse but still reasonable. Lashing out wildly in an inferior position usually only hastens defeat. Meanwhile, solid, stubborn defense can demoralize the attacker, make him lose confidence. When that happens, the tables can turn. Keep fighting, stay steady, keep morale high - and public protests are good for all of these things.

If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we'd have a pretty average record. It wasn't hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.

Winning is important, but survival is even more important. If you don't survive, you don't get to fight the next battle.

The art of politics is learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face. It's a survival game played under the glare of lights.

I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don't have to do it physically.

We invested in the downturn and we never stopped serving our clients.

I believe the minorities need to have a strategy of survival because needless aggression when you cannot change the situation does not help. Wisdom is more important than saving some cultural symbol.

There are two key lessons: a) The only way to survive in business is to be profitable, unless you have an unlimited amount of money; b) Get through your difficulty and learn to do better next time.