One of my biggest bugbears is short-term thinking.
This article says: “Hyperactivity is often driven by a focus on short-term success and myopic KPIs as well as incentives.”
For some reason, this reminded me of the response by the public sector to the government mandated savings through large scale redundancies.
Those of us who have seen this cycle repeated for a few times understand, that for example voluntary redundancies are often taken up by those employees who are confident that they can secure another job soon. Often, they are the high value, highly productive and effective people who then go on to work for the government agency next door.
An approach that focusses on what projects or initiatives can be put on hold and what is absolutely core and a ‘must have’, rather than quickly cutting jobs would make for a more rational strategy. Would it require more work, take a bit longer? Possibly. However, such a rational approach could lead to a rebalancing and refocusing on what is generating the most benefit for New Zealand.
Rather than reporting how many jobs have been lost, why don’t agencies clearly communicate, which projects they have paused; what is not being delivered, due to it being stopped to deliver the requested savings and what will the remaining key initiatives be?
In this excellent article by Martin Reeves he discusses some highly useful and applied strategies on how to avoid kneejerk actions during uncertain times.
Having used Charlie Munger’s famous approach as a guide doesn’t preclude it from being applicable to any industry and organisation.
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