Leadership Quote by Charles de Gaulle

Strategy, in de Gaulle's telling, is only as real as the person forced to carry it through the fog. The line has the blunt authority of a wartime leader who watched immaculate plans collapse on contact with events - and with other people's will. "Fast on your feet" drags strategy down from the map room into the street: the domain of sudden reversals, fractured intelligence, and moral panic. It also smuggles in a corrective to the seductive fantasy of grand design. De Gaulle isn't dismissing strategy; he's demoting it from a script to a compass.

The subtext is partly a rebuke to institutional inertia. Bureaucracies love strategy because it can be written, circulated, and defended. Adaptiveness can't be photocopied. By pairing speed with flexibility, he implies a kind of leadership that is embodied and improvisational, not merely procedural. It's a warning against confusing the existence of a plan with the capacity to act.

Context matters: de Gaulle's career was defined by France's 1940 catastrophe, the failure of static doctrine, and the need to reassert legitimacy from exile. He lived the paradox of modern command: you need long-range aims to avoid drifting, but survival depends on real-time judgment under pressure. The quote works because it compresses that paradox into a practical ethic. Strategy isn't useless because it's wrong on paper; it's useless because reality is alive, and paper isn't.