CHAPTER 2-2 ASSESSING YOUR RESOURCES What do you have going for you - a strong back? Durable nerves? Half million dollars? A law degree? A well-trained ten-person travel agency? A talent for choosing fine musicians? The resources -- just as well called "capacities" -- that you can bring in to play are the second constituent of your goals. (Your desires are the other element.) You must know your capacities, so that you can estimate the costs of various alternatives. This chapter discusses the process of making an inventory and evaluating the physical and human resources available to an organization or individual. Your capacities influence the means by which you work toward goals, as well as the goals themselves. Consider as a homely example that you want a ditch dug in front of your house. You recognize that there are a variety of ways to get the ditch dug: 1) Get a shovel and dig by hand. 2) Hire someone to dig with the equipment you provide. 3) Call a ditch-digging firm. 4) Rent a power digger. 5) Ask a relative to do it. 6) If you are a female: flirt and charm a male to do it. (Few males can pull off the reverse.) The choice among methods depends upon your finances, gender, tastes and values, and whether your back is strong or weak -- that is, upon your resources. Investments made in the past affect present assets. Sunk costs influence the course of events. But it is the result in the present of the expenditures already made in the past, rather than the expenditures themselves, that matter. Hence it is still true that sunk costs should be considered sunk and therefore disregarded in decision-making. (See Chapter 1-3). Your resources differ among various stages of personal and organizational life. When you are entering college, say, acquiring a knowledge of Chinese will require an expenditure unless you are of Chinese extraction and learned the language at home, in which case speaking the language is a resource that can influence your choice of goals at college. After you major in Chinese at college, your mastery of the language is a resource and a sunk cost. Sometimes these sunk costs can feel like a burden to you. For example, you may be a whiz at computers but not want to work on them, yet your boss may ask you to do it anyway if she knows of your ability. Another resource that can feel like a burden is if your uncle offers you his business, though it does not interest you. A short way to say all this: Your history influences your possibilities. This is why only a few firms bid for a given government contract; only those few firms have the resources to do the work at a reasonable price. Everyone recognizes this simple fact in practice, but academic theory has too long omitted the influence of history from consideration. Your job is to take stock of the situation to which your history has brought you. Mature persons are likely to have had training, experiences, and even careers that are different than their present situations. Very often you will find yourself circling back to incorporate those forgotten parts of your life into what you do now, to your great benefit. For example, I find that the research I did a quarter of a century ago on libraries and library materials turns up occasionally in my current work on very different subjects. Often it is useful to delve into your background to remember forgotten experiences and skills which are relevant to the present. I have frequently been startled at the strong connections that appear between such pieces of people's pasts as having been an Eagle Scout, or a prison guard, or on welfare and their new discoveries and new activities. As part of your resource inventory, it is important to review those earlier parts of your life and make sure they have the prominence in the inventory which they deserve. These experiences are rich sources of ideas and skills. Accountants and lawyers can easily detail your physical and financial assets -- the stocks, buildings, machines, land, etc. which you own or lease. Your organizational and personal human resources are more difficult assets to assess. Here is a checklist: a) Determine what you are doing now, and if an organization, what is being done by others. b) Find out what else has been done in past. c) Ask people what they can do that they are not doing now. d) Ask individuals what their group can do that it is not now doing. Keep in mind that an organization in being is an important asset which is more than the sum of the individual abilities of the people who work with the organization. e) Check yourself over. You may have unexpected abilities that friends and relatives will mention to you if you ask, or that testing services and counselors may help you identify. But don't be too sure that the professionals are right; treat what they say as interesting hypotheses rather than as facts. When I was in graduate school I found part-time work analysing the advertising for Chicago's famous Carson Pirie Scott department store. I found that the advertising was quite inconsistent. When I asked the top managers what kind of a store they thought Carsons to be, there was absolutely no agreement among them, and also no knowledge among them of how much they all disagreed on this. Finding the common theme and orienting the advertising around that theme promised to increase the sales potential of the store as a whole. In many business situations, analysing the nature of your customers, and of your products, can be an effective tactic. When assessing yourself, remember that you are likely to have a biased view of your capacities, either upwards or downwards or both ways at once. I'd guess that the more likely bias is an overestimate of your abilities. Item: I once read that 95 percent of people surveyed judged themselves to have a better-than-average sense of humor. Unless the survey was restricted to professional comedians, there is a serious discrepancy between people's judgments and the actual state of affairs. Item: Far more than half my students, year after year, raise their hands when I ask "Is your judgment better than that of the average person?" Item: A recent poll found that among drivers, "37% found their own driving to be 'excellent', while only 2% felt other drivers are as adept"(WSJ, Aug 17, 89, p. 1). And Baruch Fischoff says [in Against All Odds] that surveys in many countries find that about 80% of people with driving licenses say that they drive with greater-than-average skill. This self-regarding bias is so pervasive, and it affects so much of our important behavior, that it might well be included in Chapter 4-6 on Important Errors. (However, there are gains from this bias in helping a a person be optimistic about the future, and feeling in control of her/his fate. The gains might outweigh the losses from the errors it induces. And Adam Smith asserted that it is better to think a bit too much of yourself than a bit too little, because other people are likely to take you at your own estimation.1 See Chapter 5-2 on sadness and depression for related ideas.) Remember that it is important to identify your weaknesses as well as your strengths. Sometimes you need to learn what other people think you are as well as well as what you actually are. A singer may think that she is a blues singer whereas others think that she is a country-and-western singer. If she finds out about that discrepancy, she can either alter her offerings to better fit people's picture of her, or she can try to alter their picture of her to fit what she is. Either change could help her get singing jobs. As every salesperson and lawyer understands very well, your stock of acquaintances and friends is an important resource. Businesses sometimes forget, to their woe, that the goodwill of their customers is their most important asset. And it is important to analyse the nature of your customers and acquaintances. When you are young, it often is wise to try out a variety of activities in order to learn your abilities -- jobs with people and jobs without people, and so on. "Know yourself", the man said. He knew what he was talking about, especially from the point of view of setting the direction of your life and your organization. FOOTNOTE 1 Quote Theory of Moral Sentiments. Page # thinking capac22% 3-3-4d