{"id":1233,"date":"2010-02-10T01:00:06","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T09:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1233"},"modified":"2009-12-22T17:22:48","modified_gmt":"2009-12-23T01:22:48","slug":"strategy-in-4-words-%e2%80%93-i-don%e2%80%99t-like-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1233","title":{"rendered":"Strategy in 4 Words \u2013 I Don\u2019t Like It"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a blog circulating on HBR.com<\/a> that I had to think long and hard about.\u00a0 At the core, it\u2019s a simple philosophy:\u00a0 \u201cminimize evil, maximize good.\u201d\u00a0 ((Haque, Umair, December 15, 2009.\u00a0 \u201c21st Century Strategy in Four Words.\u201d\u00a0 Retrieved from http:\/\/Blogs.HBR.org on December 20, 2009.))\u00a0 First of all, if I were going to adopt this, I\u2019d reprioritize and say \u201cMaximize Good, Minimize Evil.\u201d\u00a0 But I would not adopt this.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a firm believer that there is right and wrong.\u00a0 There is always the right way to do something that challenges us philosophically, keeps us to our ideals, and makes us better people.\u00a0 At the core, we all know what the right thing to do is if we really think about it.\u00a0 Sometimes, the right thing to do may not align well with the idea of good and evil, however.\u00a0 Right and wrong may be too judgmental, but if so, good and evil are even more judgmental.\u00a0 I feel like I\u2019m making pronouncements in a religious sense around abortion or gay marriage.\u00a0 ((Sorry guys, I\u2019m so far to the left that I would probably scare most of you.))<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to think of examples of right and wrong versus good and evil and what I come up with are things that scare employees.\u00a0 I start with the most obvious to me, layoffs and\/or outsourcing.\u00a0 Organizations might pursue efficiency standards that that are right for the organization, but wrong for certain employees who would lose jobs to efficiencies or to another country like an IT shop in India.\u00a0 I think about a decade ago when the guys working to unload cargo from ships in Long Beach California struck for a couple months.\u00a0 Their basic tenet was that they didn\u2019t want anyone in their union to lose jobs.\u00a0 (I don\u2019t remember the specific name of the union).\u00a0 At risk here was the loss of jobs due to new technologies that could automate and make unloading events safer for all.\u00a0 What in my mind is an obvious right (safety and automation) was deemed as an evil by this union since they would lose many jobs over the long term.\u00a0 Even using the lens of training the union workers and making them more skilled and marketable was lost.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t judge corporate strategy with the thought of good and evil.\u00a0 Companies don\u2019t thrive on trying to make sense of judgments at this level.\u00a0 But there is a good middle ground probably.\u00a0 You can decide that Green, while not always in the perfectly best interests of the shareholders is a corporate value and is the \u201cright\u201d thing to do.\u00a0 Is it evil because shareholders have reduced dividends for 3 quarters while manufacturing plants retool themselves?\u00a0 Sometimes our strategies at a corporate level are just too grey for any precision judgment, but once we know what our values are, we can decide how to apply them with diligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There has been a blog circulating on HBR.com that I had to think long and hard about.\u00a0 At the core, it\u2019s a simple philosophy:\u00a0 \u201cminimize evil, maximize good.\u201d\u00a0 ((Haque, Umair, December 15, 2009.\u00a0 \u201c21st Century Strategy in Four Words.\u201d\u00a0 Retrieved…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47,8],"tags":[60],"class_list":["post-1233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-governance","category-strategies","tag-strategy-in-4-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1233"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1253,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions\/1253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}