The Basics: Resources

         The basics:  Well you have to start somewhere and you might as well start with your resources. One of the most basic concepts to developing any kind of strategy is to know how much resources you are going to be working with. Some people might be blessed with lots of resources to play around with will others will have only the bare minimum or not even that and will have to incorporate gathering resources into the strategy.

            For those that have resources a plenty then you have more room to make mistakes and you can increase your risk as losing precious resources will not be much of a bother to you. Say for instance, you were building a house and you had two truck loads of lumber to build that house with. Well you wouldn’t be too worried about the precision with which your carpenters were cutting with. You could be a little more careless about how accurate the cuts were meaning that if they cut a piece of lumber with two feet left over just to get a one foot piece, well you would just have a lot of left over wood. Then from those resources if you felt like it then you could even build something out of that.

           For those that have moderate resources, continuing with the house scenario say you only got one truckload of lumber to use, then you would be concerned a little bit more about how accurately the carpenters were cutting with.  You would tell the carpenters to cut so that you would not be wasting so much lumber. So that one foot piece of lumber used would not be the piece that you cut but what is actually left over. So instead of having enough lumber to build you another floor or room, you would only have enough to build you a nice tree house or something like that.

          Finally, those of us that have very scare resources then having the carpenters cut with extreme precision and having them do it right the first time would be of utmost importance as you only have say half a truckload and that was the last they had available for six months and you had to get it built in three months. This is were strategy plays a huge role in how we do things. Myself I like to do things knowing that I don’t have very much to work with as I believe this allows for some real strategy to come into play. The less we have to work with forces us to really think about how we are going to approach the project or task that is set out before us.

           The three scenarios I gave you were plenty of resources, moderate resources, and scarce resources to work with. Now every amount of resource we have will differ but these three will get you started and don’t think that this just applies to building a house you can use this model for anything, Say, amount of paper you have vs. how much you want to print out, amount of gas that you have for a generator for doomsday, or how big of a cake to make for the company picnic.