The Social Strategist

And the tradeoffs between resources and time

For many years I believed a strategist could get away with distance from others. My logic—if your ideas are brilliant enough then you can simply roll them out to everyone and they'll catch on.

But that's not really how ideas work. Nobody listens to you unless they grant you an audience. They only permit that audience if they connect with you.

Let's hang some meat on those bones. Once I was in a leadership position and the leader of an adjacent organization, with which we had a partnership, made a decision that would certainly increase my organization's workload overnight. By a large margin.

Not the worst problem to have, you might think. That's what I thought too, for a moment.

But the impact was like expanding our responsibility by fifty percent without time for planning or an injection of resources to deal with the newly expanded workload.

Imagine a police department being told to cover an adjacent city tomorrow, in addition to its existing work. Or an army that's to widen an attack to include a far greater front or objective.