Jim Cooper

“Increasing self-awareness is an intervention in and of itself, and the precursor to making any other changes.”
― David Peter Stroh, Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results

“Since irregular combatants don’t have the combat power to stand up to government forces in a direct fight, they tend to hide, and thus to rely on cover and concealment. The concealment and protection afforded by complex environments help them avoid detection by security forces, letting them move freely and fight only when and where they choose. For this reason, guerrillas, bandits, and pirates have always flourished in areas where cover was good and government presence was weak. For most of human history, this meant remote, forested, mountainous areas such as the Afghan mountains discussed in the preface. But with the unprecedented level of global urbanization, this pattern is changing, prompting a major shift in the character of conflict. In the future environment of overcrowded, undergoverned, urban, coastal areas—combined with increasingly excellent remote surveillance capabilities (including drones, satellites, and signals intelligence) in remote rural areas—the cover is going to be in the cities.”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
― Thucydides

“Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.”
― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value