Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
“Leaders must be able to master four major tasks. Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach–in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organiza
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Peter the Great understood that the survival of his regime depended upon membership of the European states system and the diplomatic leverage it could be used to secure – like his useful alliance with Denmark against Sweden. To be driven out of ‘political Europe’ by Poland or Sweden would have been a catastrophe.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
A Plan Is Not a Strategy
youtube.comI found my new department located in another abandoned temple – this time much older than Alfred Mond’s shrine to the Imperial Chemical Industries. The Old Admiralty had been purpose-built as the headquarters of the British Navy in 1703. Its courtyard walls were topped with leaping dolphins, the ceilings decorated with plaster anchors, and the inte
... See moreRory Stewart • Politics on the Edge
I believe that freedom is the foundation of efficiency, both national and military. Thus it is a practical folly as well as a spiritual surrender to “go totalitarian” as a result of fighting for existence against the totalitarian states. Cut off the incentive to freely given service and you dry up the life source of a free community.
B.H. Liddell Hart • Why Don't We Learn from History?
The federal government has become the domain of hedgehogs, urgently needed people but profoundly insufficient. It is wisdom that is lacking, and there is no civil service code for the wise.