"In whatever position you find yourself determine first your objective"
About this Quote
Stripped of romance, Foch's line is a field manual for the mind: before you move, decide what winning looks like. It sounds obvious until you remember how often institutions and people confuse activity with strategy. Foch, a French marshal forged in the catastrophe and improvisation of World War I, understood that momentum can be a narcotic. Armies march, governments legislate, committees meet; without a declared objective, all that motion becomes expensive theater.
The phrasing does two quiet things. "In whatever position you find yourself" acknowledges constraint and surprise. You're not always choosing the battlefield; sometimes you're handed a mess. That realism is the opposite of inspirational poster-talk. It grants the chaos, then demands agency anyway. "Determine first" makes intention a prerequisite, not an afterthought. Foch isn't praising boldness; he's warning against it. Boldness without a goal is just a story you tell afterward.
The subtext is command responsibility. Objectives are not private wishes; they're shared coordinates that let disparate actors align, improvise, and still converge. In wartime, unclear aims turn courage into waste and errors into slaughter. In peacetime, the same logic applies: organizations drift into metrics, careers drift into busyness, politics drifts into permanent campaigning. Foch offers a brutal antidote: define the end state, then judge every sacrifice against it.
It's also a reminder that strategy is moral. Choosing an objective is choosing what you're willing to destroy, risk, or abandon to get there. That decision belongs at the start, not buried under the noise of movement.
The phrasing does two quiet things. "In whatever position you find yourself" acknowledges constraint and surprise. You're not always choosing the battlefield; sometimes you're handed a mess. That realism is the opposite of inspirational poster-talk. It grants the chaos, then demands agency anyway. "Determine first" makes intention a prerequisite, not an afterthought. Foch isn't praising boldness; he's warning against it. Boldness without a goal is just a story you tell afterward.
The subtext is command responsibility. Objectives are not private wishes; they're shared coordinates that let disparate actors align, improvise, and still converge. In wartime, unclear aims turn courage into waste and errors into slaughter. In peacetime, the same logic applies: organizations drift into metrics, careers drift into busyness, politics drifts into permanent campaigning. Foch offers a brutal antidote: define the end state, then judge every sacrifice against it.
It's also a reminder that strategy is moral. Choosing an objective is choosing what you're willing to destroy, risk, or abandon to get there. That decision belongs at the start, not buried under the noise of movement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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