Tag Archives: win-win

The trouble with compromise…

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I’ve been told from time to time that I have a tendency towards being an uncompromising bastard. I’m fairly sure that wasn’t meant as a compliment at the time. It occurs to me, though, that we spend an inordinate amount of time looking for the win-win solution. At best, most people accept a win-lose proposition where at least one person gives up some part of what they were trying to achieve. More often, we tend to settle into the lose-lose option where everyone walks away equally dissatisfied with the result.

It seems to me that life is too damned short for half measures. When’s the last time you remember anything great happening because someone settled for “enough”? If you said “never,” you’re on the right track.

Maybe that does make me uncompromising. I think I’ll find a way to live with it.

What they don’t teach at business school…

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So, I’m thinking of writing a book about all the things they don’t teach you at business school. The problem with business schools, or mine at least, is that it is taught by instructors and populated with students who desperately believe that the world is full of puppy dogs an lollypops and that all that hard decisions can be a “win-win-win” for everyone.

I call bullshit. Want to guess why it’s a hard decision? Because if it were an easy one, some schmuck further down the corporate food chain could have made it. It’s a hard decision because in the end someone is going to walk away with less than they wanted. Paint it any way you want, but losing still sucks even when the whore is dressed up and called “compromise.”

Why are we afraid in this society of head-to-head competition? We love to watch it on television… check out the ratings for programs like Survivor© or the NFL© or any of the other hundred shows that pit one person against another. Competition is human instinct. It’s why we climb over the next hill. It’s why we crossed ocean. It’s why we hurtle brave men and women into space strapped to the bombs we affectionately call rockets.

When we as a society stopped competing and started worrying about everyone’s special sensitivities, we sounded the charge for our own slow descent into mediocrity. The situation is grave, but not hopeless, provided we are not yet too timid to once again stand on the shoulders of giants and dare to do great things.