COST ACCOUNTING FOR DUMMIES AND DADS
Everything seemed so important, so urgent then, in need of action, reaction, and proactive steps that we couldn’t step back, see big picture concepts — we must remind ourselves that most things important/urgent/irritating to us are of little consequence to others in any meaningful way.
We (or do I mean me?) keep pounding tables, arguing, debating, venting and explaining when the time for that has passed, when it wasn’t crucial enough to get riled in the first place.
Post-mortems on lost opportunities can be a dissection of every element of the process, of why we pursued one chance over another, to examine what was fact vis-à-vis emotional theatre — in search of an effective result vis-à-vis emotional validation.
In business/government, ‘opportunity cost’ gets tossed around, about as significant as misplaced paperclips — calculating sunk costs, and hopefully, value too — of opportunities pursued and cost/loss of opportunities lost.
What is our actual cost of missed opportunities?
Is it the same, calculable, or do we have misplaced feelings attached to missed opportunities as much as we did for the ones we pursued but lost?
And why?
Did our competitor return calls promptly, get the sale, get the deal, or secure the meeting?
But there seems more to this than deconstructing a failure-to-win if we want to choose better and win more often.
Or were opportunities we missed inevitable — lost job opportunity or new client won — ones we should be more conscious about missing?
Like missed opportunities to validate someone or apologize.
To make amends, rebuild the bridges we burned or blew up, build new bridges, tighten old ties that have gone slack through neglect, what about those?
