Donald Rumsfeld Quotes on Planning (11 Quotes)

Plan backwards as well as forward. Set objectives and trace back to see how to achieve them. You may find that no path can get you there. Plan forward to see where your steps will take you, which may not be clear or intuitive.

It's 16 to three. I think it's a mistake, and what we have to do for the United States is to make sure that planning does go forward.

You will launch many projects, but have time to finish only a few. So think, plan, develop, launch and tap good people to be responsible. Give them authority and hold them accountable. Trying to do too much yourself creates a bottleneck.

We're not going to rule out anything, but we don't have any plans at the present time to use U.S. forces in that way,

So the suggestion that there isn't a plan strikes me as more a talking point than a reality,

The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the ... Iraqi security forces deal with it to the extent they're able to.

A war plan is something that is a plan that's developed before things start, and the minute things start one has to take account of the realities that you find in the world. That is what was done last evening. That is what will be done today and tomorrow and the next day.

I would be delighted to take credit for it. It's a good plan. It's a creative and an innovative plan, and it's going to work, ... it's a little early for postmortems.

had a plan that would have gone up above that had it been necessary.

Think ahead. Don't let day-to-day operations drive out planning.

We're within 49 miles of Baghdad, ... He's being closed on from the north, south, and there's so many people running around hyperventilating that things aren't going well. This plan is working.