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Strategy (7): interlude – strategy and scarcity

This is the seventh post in a series – start here.

There will never be enough time, tools, people, or other resources to achieve everything you want to do – especially in the face of everything that everybody else wants to do.

The practice of strategy helps us live with this scarcity by managing it:

  • Eliminating possibilities, either permanently…
  • or for a time (structuring your work)…
  • both of which are ways of focusing resources…
  • which will allow you to get more done…
  • or gather more resources…
  • so that you can get more done in future…
  • like some kind of glorious snowball.

Strategy asks, given that there will never be enough time, tools, people or other resources – and given what other people want to do – what shall we do?

1 thought on “Strategy (7): interlude – strategy and scarcity”

  1. I think it’s a Craig Groeschel thing talking about scarcity that has stuck with me. What hit home for me was how scarcity can be a wonderful thing for our strategic planning. Scarcity forces us to consider options both in vision and strategy that we may not have necessarily seen before. I can mean we can become more effective and efficient both in the short and the long term.

    It forces us to ask:
    What could we best do?
    What should we be doing?
    What could only we do?
    When I have lots of resources (rare!) it can be easy to become lazy, to not ask the difficult questions. Scarcity ups the ante and can be so helpful

I'd love to hear your thoughts and recommended resources...

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