Musashi's Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone)

Businessman:
I see this precept as a warning to embrace important things
wholeheartedly. In business, as in life, we often face an all-or-nothing
equation, one where if we’re going to do something we need to
devote all our time and resources until it’s done in order to make
sure it is successful. Anything less dooms us to failure. That’s not to
say that we cannot multitask at times, but rather that in certain
circumstances that tactic will drive a suboptimal result. For example,
all too often in large corporations or government institutions projects
are understaffed, underfunded, or under-supported, we take our eye
off the prize, and then for some strange reason we wonder why we
were ultimately unsuccessful. In the end the project cost too much,
delivers too little, takes too long, or ultimately never gets done
satisfactorily if at all.
At any given time we are pulled in multiple directions, various
projects and programs competing for our attention. This means that
we need to prioritize in order to be able to focus and finish on the
most important items to avoid those aforementioned unsatisfactory
results. Once we complete our top priorities then we can then move
on to the next ones and the ones after that. In business parlance this
is called portfolio management, that is the application of a systematic

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oversight and prioritization process that scrutinizes investments,
projects, and activities across the enterprise and then assigns
resources to them so that the most important ones get done first. We
calculate things like ROI (Return on Investment), IRR (Internal Rate
of Return), NPV (Net Present Value), TCO (Total Cost of
Ownership), and EP (Economic Profit) in order to identify which
ventures will generate the best returns for our investments, but the
challenge is that numbers alone, no matter how many of them we
study, do not tell the whole story. They are not enough. This is where
feelings, honed from intuition and experience, play a vital role.
Remember the Ford Pinto debacle of the 1970s? The short version
is that failure on Ford’s part to invest in a low value part that would
have made their cars safer led to the recall of 1.5 million
automobiles, massive lawsuits, and a criminal indictment. One of the
tools that Ford used to make decisions in those days was a cost-
benefit analysis, a very common tool in business. According to the
company’s estimates their unsafe fuel tanks were projected to cause
180 burn deaths, 180 serious injuries, and the destruction of 2,100
vehicles per year. They calculated that the company would have to
pay $200,000 per death, $67,000 per injury, and $700 per vehicle,
which made for a total of $49.5 million. This was compared against
the cost of $11.00 per vehicle to implement the fix which calculated
out to $137 million per year, roughly three times the cost of doing
nothing. Clearly it was cheaper for Ford to let their vehicles and their
customers burn to a crisp, but was that the right thing to do?
Obviously not, but that’s the decision they made anyway. Why? In