Quote of the Day: Dwight D. Eisenhower on Leadership

It is 3 AM and you are staring at the ceiling, replaying the same stubborn knot: the email you can’t write, the conversation you keep postponing, the decision that refuses to resolve. You’ve tried tightening the frame, less risk, fewer variables, smaller asks, and somehow the problem only hardens. That’s the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower’s contrarian advice lands with a jolt: “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.”

Enlarge it doesn’t mean inflate the drama; it means expand the map. Many “unsolvable” problems are engineered by cramped assumptions: only two options, only one stakeholder, only this quarter’s budget, only my pride. When you widen the lens, you often find the hidden levers, an overlooked ally, a constraint that can be renegotiated, a related issue that, once addressed, makes the original obstacle dissolve. The stuck sales team stops obsessing over a single product tweak and starts asking what customers are really buying. The family argument shifts from who’s right to what everyone needs to feel respected.

Bigger frames also disrupt zero-sum thinking. Small problems invite small wars: your gain, my loss. Enlarged problems make room for leadership, the kind that convenes, reframes, and trades scarce resources for shared purpose. Paradoxically, complexity can help: the more angles you allow, the more likely a creative solution emerges, one that’s durable instead of merely expedient. This is resilience by design: refusing the tunnel and choosing the horizon.

Dwight D. Eisenhower knew something about impossible briefs. As Supreme Allied Commander in World War II and later U.S. president, he operated where plans met chaos, and where enlarging the question often revealed the path through it.

December 7 carries its own echo in American memory, a date that reminds us how swiftly the world can widen. Today, take one problem you’ve been trying to shrink and ask a larger, braver question: What system is this living in, and what changes when I zoom out?