3 Resolve - being the big boss with the big idea
There are hundreds of books in the market place with titles along the lines of “How you can make a million dollars by starting (fill in your own blank), just like I did”. If such books are to be believed, it is within everyone’s grasp to be a multi-millionnaire, a pop-star, a super-model, a great artist, an athlete, or perhaps all of these at once. This author has no axe to grind about the promises of other authors! But it is noteworthy that very few people ever do achieve these dreams. The Entrepreneurial school of strategy suggests that it is the character of leaders such as Branson, Churchill, Ford and Napoleon which enabled them to achieve what others could not. This is a thought very much taken up by Stephen Covey in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, that developing as a person is the secret to success, rather than following a particular course of action. It may be too late to become Napoleon or Winston Churchill, but there is a particular characteristic of decisive leaders which any individual or organisation can emulate, and that is, simply, decisiveness itself, or resolve.
Having picked a worthwhile approach in the Thinking minute, the Ten Minute Strategist now has a minute to decide if he really is going to put it into practice. After having spent only a minute on each of the Situation and Thinking, assigning a whole minute to this might seem a luxury, but Resolve is about much more than just deciding to push ahead come what may.
Resolve is about the question: what are we actually committing to, and how far are we willing to go to make it work?
There are three Rs to consider as part of resolve, and they are:
— What do we have to invest to make this work?
— What are the chances and implications of this going wrong? How do we get out if we have to? Is there a point of no return, and, if so, what is it?
— What will this strategy give us if it really is successful? Does this justify the Resources and the Risk?
At this point in the ten minutes, you need to realise that you are not committing yourself to the course of action right now — you choose to adopt the strategy after you have finished it. What you are doing here is identifying the factors which inform your ultimate decision.
Back to the villagers facing their destruction at the hands of bandits. They now have a solution to the problem: hire Samurai (or gunslingers, if you are watching The Magnificent Seven — interestingly, out of deference to Mexican sensibilities, the villagers in the Magnificent Seven initially set off to buy guns, but are told that it is cheaper to hire gunmen than to buy guns). They now have to answer the three questions.
On Resources, the villagers have to decide on what basis they can hire Samurai. The only thing they have to offer is a little money and some rice. In fact, they woefully underestimate the amount of money or rice it would take to hire a Samurai, but they also completely fail to understand the willingness of Ronin, masterless Samurai, to find meaning for their lives by committing themselves to fighting. It’s worth remembering that you can be wildly off in your estimates and still succeed — if the strategy is a sound one.
On Risk, the villagers have to face the fear that setting off on a quest to find Samurai will take away men who could have defended the village, and the attempt may make the bandits even more furious. In fact, once faced, these risks disappear: the men could have not defended the village anyway, and the bandits were never going to show mercy (although in the 3 Amigos version, the bandits do punish the villagers for hiring the Amigos).
On Return, the villagers take stock of what they are going to get back at the end, including facing the possibility that the Samurai may turn out to be worse than the bandits, in terms of taking their daughters. Ultimately, though, they conclude that they have a chance of saving the village.