x-xi The more you study the experience of others, and the more you practice yourself, the more you can do. What works in the future is some combination of what worked before in the past. Great scientists, great artists, great business leaders - they don't "reach for the stars," they grasp what works...
 The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action - fast.

For [former CEO of General Electric Jack] Welch, a good idea was something that worked before somewhere else. You search for what works, and that tells you what you can do. Then you go ahead and do it... The art of what works is the secret of strategy, a timeless truth for success in business or any other field.

xi Yes, every situation is unique. But every situation is made up of elements that are similar to something in the past. The combination is new, but the elements are not. In the art of what works, the answer is always different, but the question is always the same: What past successes can I draw from and combine in this new situation?

p.3 you can never predict the future, no matter how hard you try. You can gather more and more data and analyze them night and day, but you still can't know which strategy will work and which will not. Whatever you do, your information remains imperfect. It will not yield an answer to what your strategy should be.

p.4 The word strategy entered the English language only in 1810, at the height of Napoleon Bonaparte's military success.

p.4 Von Clausewitz uses a vivid term for imperfect information: the "fog" of war.

The great uncertainty of all data in War is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not unfrequently - like the effect of fog or moonshine - gives to things exaggerated dimensions and an unnatural appearance.

p.5 Pragmatism became America's core philosophy at the start of the twentieth century... Pragmatism tells you to pick whichever one works the best for you in your current situation.

p.6 Napoleon... was only 26 years old when he won his first campaign. It took place in northern Italy against a superior Italian and Austrian army. Napoleon had never fought before in open-field warfare, yet he won a dozen battles without losing one.
 How did Napoleon do it? Through study. He tells us himself:

The principles of warfare are those that guided the great captains whose high deeds history has transmitted to us - Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Eugene of Savoy, Frederick the Great... The history of their eighty-three campaigns would constitute a complete treatise on the art of war.

p.8 in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Henry Mintzberg warns against rigid adherence to plans. Instead, he favors "emergent" strategy, where you adjust your plans over time as new information emerges.

p.14 In the art of what works, the means precede the ends. The goal comes second, not first.

p.28 [researcher Gary] Klein tells us that the goal arises when you see that an action can succeed:

 What triggers active problem-solving is the ability to recognize when a goal is reachable.

 ...According to Klein, a strategist evaluates the chance of success of a course of action "to determine whether to pursue that goal in the first place."

...There must be an experiential ability to judge the solvability of problems prior to working on them... In expert intuition, then the course of action precedes the goal. Klein notes that the decision maker sees an opportunity to succeed and turns that into a goal, in the same way that Napoleon fought a battle only when he saw a way to win it.

p.31-32 In expert intuition... you don't know what goal you can reach until you see a way to reach it... Kuhn shows how, in case after case, scientific discovery precedes the acceptance of a theory to explain that discovery... the unit of scientific achievement is the solved problem... Napoleon looked to the campaigns of the "great captains" - that is, to their achievements. He applied those achievements in different combinations to his own battles.

p.32 [Kuhn quoted] Intuitions... are the tested and shared possessions of the members of a successful group, and the novice acquires them through training as part of his preparation for group-membership.

This group activity constitutes "normal science", which to Kuhn "means research firmly based on one or more past scientific achievements." For Kuhn, the scientific method starts with scientists noticing the achievements of other scientists.

p.39 By fighting where you can win and holding back where you can't, you conform to circumstances instead of trying to bend them to your will.

p.70 Intuition can be "sharpened by study," comes from "a diversified store of information accumulated in their memories," and comes with a "strong sense of curiosity," which is "not an innate trait but has been learned through the cumulative reinforcement of repeated experiences."

p.92 [Richard Koch quoted] Strategy should not be over-planned. Ideally, it should emerge as part of an iterative process of thought, hypothesis, experimentation, success, and renewed experimentation... The process should combine analysis and intuition, and should be open-ended. There should never be a "final solution;" the strategy should always evolve, and continually deepen.

p.95 "try something, see if it works and learn from your experience"

p.96 Expert intuition asks: what works? ...A successful strategy emerges not from analysis or experiment, but from what works.

p.102 "Strategic Intent" is the title of an influential 1989 article by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahaled... What's different about strategic intent?
 Flexibility. Hamel and Prahaled explain that strategic intent is flexible as to means while being clear about ends. It leaves room for improvisation. Achieving your strategic intent requires enormous creativity.

p.106 You look for what works, not as a competency but as an activity that has elements of success... What works can come from anywhere

p.139 Thanks to imperfect information, you can't predict the future.

p.179 Hammer and Champy tell us that

Reengineering a company means tossing aside old systems and starting over. It involves going back to the beginning and inventing a better way of doing work.

p.216 the art of what works gets you from where you are now to where you can go, which is not necessarily where you want to go.