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Setting
Priorities & Making Tradeoffs
By Michael Alan Hamlin
May 10, 2004
Early in their development I started talking to my
children about setting priorities and making tradeoffs. Priorities
and tradeoffs, it seems to me, are two sides of a coin. They go
together. Setting priorities is the acknowledgement that there are
some things we want more than others, and that if we can't have
everything, the things we want most are the things we'll go after.
Tradeoffs happen naturally when priorities are set. We say goodbye
to lesser goals so we can concentrate on achieving more desirable
objectives.
This summer, one of my children decided she would go on a retreat
with friends she's developed over the past year. But then it so
happened that the weekend of the retreat turned out to be the only
weekend we were able to arrange a quick family getaway to a beach
resort we've long wanted to visit. My daughter was distraught over
the hard reality that she had to choose between the retreat and
our annual family trip. And the family had to decide to go without
our conflicted child, or stay home.
The decisions of our child and the rest of the family both involved
wins and loses. For our daughter, she'd have the satisfaction of
attending the retreat and doing something with her friends that
she feels is worthwhile, and important to her development. But she'd
lose the opportunity to take this family trip, and enjoy one of
the Philippines' beautiful beach resorts with those who are closest
to her in the world.
For the family, the choice was easier to make because either way
the weekend would be spent less one child. But if we stayed home,
we'd feel a little less guilty about enjoying ourselves despite
the temporary downsizing of our family. On the other hand, being
stuck at home everyone else would be really grumpy for having sacrificed
some high-quality beach time no matter how much they love our daughter.
Our daughter decided, in the spirit of dutifulness, to go to the
retreat with the other members of her youth group from the local
parish despite my increasingly strident objections. The rest of
the family made the obvious decision to go to the beach. Everyone
felt satisfaction with their respective decision, but that didn't
make the sense of lost opportunity disappear completely for anyone
either.
And that's the way priorities and tradeoffs work. Satisfaction,
no matter how satisfying, is never absolute. Something is invariably
sacrificed in order to achieve some sense of satisfaction. I think
it would be fair to suggest that our children have developed a certain
level of acceptance of the importance of being able to assess opportunities,
determine which are potentially the most rewarding, and make the
conscious decision to sacrifice less worthy opportunities in order
to achieve them. They know that some things are worth giving up,
and others aren't.
As a result, I'm fairly confident that they are going to be able
to achieve the level of focus they need in their lives to accomplish
some significant things. If they were to go about life thinking
they could "have it all," they'd likely wind up doing
a lot of things not very well, and not with very rewarding results.
By focusing on the things that are really important, their energies
will be applied to specific, high but achievable goals made more
achievable by the relentless efficiency with which they are addressed.
The benefits of setting priorities and making tradeoffs are pretty
easy to understand. Which is why I always find myself wondering
why politicians almost never seem to be able to set priorities or
to make the tradeoffs necessary to focus limited resources like
time and budgets on achieving truly important goals. Take U.S. presidential
aspirant John Kerry, for example. Some of the time he is populist,
and some of the time he's pro big business. Some of the time he's
for the Iraq war, and some of the time he's not.
I started thinking of priorities and tradeoffs in the context of
Philippine politics last week because a number of other people and
I were asked to comment on post election scenarios while appearing
on a popular talk show last week. Not unexpectedly, the discussion
quickly underlined the reality that there are many, many things
that need to happen to get the Philippines moving faster towards
a broader level of development and prosperity.
And it was just as clear that no president can do all the things
that need to be done in the space of a six-year administration.
It seemed pretty obvious, in fact, that whoever is elected president
should quickly decided not to do everything that needs to be done,
and to clearly communicate that decision. The "new" commander-in-chief,
with the help of surveys and wise advisors, should select two or
three most important things to accomplish for the country and its
people during the coming administration.
It occurred to me that this is what former president Fidel V. Ramos
- who started out not being a politician - did by default. His mostly
successful administration focused on power and communications. As
a result, the power crisis was successfully addressed (despite some
arguments to the contrary these days), and the telecom sector was
liberalized. Telecom liberalization gave us some of the best quality,
cost-effective telecom and IT infrastructure in the region.
So my wish for the next president is to choose just a couple of
similar big and somewhat audacious goals, and then do nothing but
concentrate on making them reality.
(Michael Alan Hamlin is the managing
director of consultancy TeamAsia and the author of three books on
Asian economies and companies. His latest book is Marketing Asian
Places, of which he is a co-author (Wiley, 2001), and he is currently
at work on High Visibility: The Making and Marketing of Asian Professionals
into Celebrities. Write him at mahamlin@teamasia.com.).
Copyright © 2003 Michael Alan
Hamlin. All Rights Reserved.
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