We heard last night at The Council on Foreign Relations from The New York Times' chief Washington correspondent, David Sanger. I have just added his new book The Inheritance to the reading pile. The "inheritance" he refers to are the many messes President Obama now inherits from his predecessor and some policy prescriptions to address them.
Sanger said that among the most unfortunate aspects of the previous Administration's fixation on the Iraq War have been the terrible "costs of strategic distraction." This notion of strategic distraction should be an essential consideration in every organization. How little energy we invest in calibrating opportunity costs in ways that will help us limit or prevent them in the future. Of course, it is easier to consider outcomes stemming from actions that have been attempted or undertaken. Accountability in these scenarios is detectable although not always ascribable. On the other hand, we make it so hard even to discuss accountability and develop lessons learned for actions not attempted or undertaken because, well, they were crowded out by other less worthy pursuits.
It's a creative leap, for sure, but one could imagine opportunity costs somehow appearing on a corporate balance sheet or income statement. For every firm that discovered or invented something amazing, how many of its competitors with access to the same or similar talent, technology and market intelligence simply missed it. What were they doing when the other guy pulled the end run and disrupted the market with breakthrough innovation? Strategic distraction matters in concept because how we spend or fail to spend our time and money matters in reality.
Sanger said that among the most unfortunate aspects of the previous Administration's fixation on the Iraq War have been the terrible "costs of strategic distraction." This notion of strategic distraction should be an essential consideration in every organization. How little energy we invest in calibrating opportunity costs in ways that will help us limit or prevent them in the future. Of course, it is easier to consider outcomes stemming from actions that have been attempted or undertaken. Accountability in these scenarios is detectable although not always ascribable. On the other hand, we make it so hard even to discuss accountability and develop lessons learned for actions not attempted or undertaken because, well, they were crowded out by other less worthy pursuits.
It's a creative leap, for sure, but one could imagine opportunity costs somehow appearing on a corporate balance sheet or income statement. For every firm that discovered or invented something amazing, how many of its competitors with access to the same or similar talent, technology and market intelligence simply missed it. What were they doing when the other guy pulled the end run and disrupted the market with breakthrough innovation? Strategic distraction matters in concept because how we spend or fail to spend our time and money matters in reality.