Friday, May 21, 2004

Business Quotes I'm Adding to My Collection

Saw some great quotes at this post on An Entrepreneur's Life that I definitely am going to add to my quote collection.  Here's the first one:

“If you can’t describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven’t got a plan. ‘But,’ people may say, ‘I’ve got a complex strategy. It can’t be reduced to a page.’ That’s nonsense. That’s not a complex strategy. It’s a complex thought about the strategy.”
- Larry Bossidy, Chairman, Honeywell International, in ‘Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done’

What most people tend to not understand is that the Strategic Content, the strategy itself, should only consume about 5% of the effort, time, etc.  The Strategic Process of idenitfying goals and objective, formulating strategy, implementing strategy, and controlling strategy should consumer the other 95%.  I agree with the author of the original post and would argue that anyone should be able to describe their strategy in less than 20 minutes; 20 minutes seems to give too much time for thoughts about the strategy to intrude.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ” - Leonardo DaVinci

Simplicity, brevity, classic lines can and are, especially now, the ultimate in sophistication.  It seems that a lot of people are just starting to learn this; took quite a long time for DaVinci's thought to break through.  Why is the new Sony media player doomed to not blow the IPod out of the water?  It's just not simple enough.

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