Firing Line: Too Many Front Lines

I encountered objective overload after I became the managing director of strategy at a large trading firm. In the wake of our three-year strategic planning, we were green-lighting too many objectives. We didn't have the resources to execute all of our plans, and being the new guy, I did a poor job of deciding which plans to execute and which to place on the back burner.

I had a debriefing with the heavies in the firm, and we prioritized all the strategic objectives that supported the vision of the owners and the three-year plan. Then we identified the available resources and matched them to our priorities. We then executed the objectives we could at that moment and looked to add resources that would help us achieve the remaining objectives in short order. Finally, there were objectives that we didn't need to execute at that time, and we were able to put these in a drawer for possible utilization down the road.

The U.S. Army deployed to Somalia in the early 1990s with the honorable intentions of feeding that country's poor citizens, a mission unfamiliar to the U.S. military. The Clinton administration wanted to shift the military's core competency from fighting and winning wars to humanitarian operations like Somalia, and years later, Bosnia.

Unfortunately, the administration didn't provide the proper resources to these forces. Somalia was a war zone, complete with warlords, but our government didn't want to appear as the aggressor in this operation, so it denied requests for such essentials as armor from commanders in the field.