Leadership Quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower

“If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it” is the kind of counterintuitive command only a leader who lived inside sprawling systems could credibly deliver. Eisenhower isn’t romanticizing bigness for its own sake; he’s prescribing a tactical shift. When a problem feels “unsolvable,” it’s often because it’s been framed too narrowly, trapped inside the wrong jurisdiction, the wrong timeline, or the wrong set of incentives. Enlarge it and you may reveal levers that were invisible up close: new stakeholders, alternate resources, a higher-order objective that makes trade-offs possible.

The subtext is pure Eisenhower-era statecraft: scale is power, but also clarity. In coalition warfare and Cold War governance, small problems frequently weren’t small at all; they were symptoms. A supply bottleneck might be a command-structure failure. A local political flare-up might be a proxy battle. By expanding the frame, you move from whack-a-mole to systems thinking, from treating headaches to diagnosing the disease.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to managerial timidity. “Enlarge it” implies courage to risk bigger conversations and bigger responsibility. It’s easier to claim a problem is insoluble than to admit you’ve defined it in a way that protects you from hard choices. Eisenhower’s line pressures the listener to stop fetishizing tidy solutions and start building the conditions where solutions become possible: broader alliances, longer horizons, and objectives big enough to absorb discomfort. In politics, as in war, sometimes the way out is up.