Why The Coming Oil Crunch Will Shock The World
by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Sat, 07/07/2018
My years working in corporate strategy taught me that every strategic framework, no matter how complex (some I worked on were hundreds of pages long), boils down to just two things:
1.Where do you want to go? (Vision)
2.How are you going to get there? (Resources)
Vision is the easier one by far. You just dream up a grand idea about where you want the company to be at some target future date, Yes, there’s work in assuring that everybody on the management team truly shares and believes in the vision, but that’s a pretty stratightforward sales job for the CEO.
By the way, this same process applies at the individual level, too, for anyone who wants to achieve a major goal by some point in the future. The easy part of the strategy is deciding you want to be thinner, healthier, richer, or more famous.
But the much harder part, for companies and individuals alike, is figuring out ‘How to get there’. There are always fewer resources than one would prefer.
Corporate strategists always wish for more employees to implement the vision, with better training with better skills. Budgets and useful data are always scarcer than desired, as well.
Similar constraints apply to us individuals. Who couldn’t use more motivation, time and money to pursue their goals?
Put together, the right Vision coupled to a reasonably mapped set of Resources can deliver amazing results. Think of the Apollo Moon missions. You have to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there to succeed. That’s pretty straightforward, right?
So, it should be little surprise that the opposite, a lack of Vision and/or Resources, leads to underperformance — and, eventually, decline. Think Kodak or Xerox. Or third-generation family wealth that has dwindled away to nothing. In a changing world, refusing to change with it is a losing strategy.
A great strategy aligns people’s interests and motivations with the available resources. More importantly, it provides a meaningful framework for action, one that gives a sense of purpose that will motivate everyone through difficult or trying times.
The grand goal of defeating the Nazis provided sufficient motivation for people to buy war bonds, scrimp on consumption, plant victory gardens, and go without nylon. A large part of our national resources were dedicated to the larger strategy of winning the war. Because of the strategy everyone shared, practically nobody complained of this repurposing as a ‘time of sacrifice’ or as an imposed burden.
Given the right framework and the means to achieve it, people will literally crawl through mud in freezing temperatures — and find it deeply satisfying. But given zero context or insufficient resources, people quickly become demoralized or rebellious (just observe how quickly most folks get royally pissed off at having to sit on the tarmac for a few extra minutes before their airplane takes off.)
Strategy matters. A lot.
A Nation Adrift, A World In Denial
Here’s why I’m harping so much on strategy: the US is operating without a viable one.
We neither have a compelling Vision of where we want to go, nor any sense of the Resources required to change with the many transitions underway around us.
The current ‘strategy’ (if we can be so generous as to call it that), is nothing more than “business-as-usual” (BAU).
The US is assuming it is always going to have more cars and trucks on the road this year than last year, more goods sold, a larger economy, more jobs, and the world’s most powerful military. That’s the BAU model. And it has largely worked for the past century.
But it can’t work going forward. And the longer we pursue it, the more of our future prosperity we ruin.
The Rest…HERE
