Reduce Risks: Specialize

Everyone faces risks and should strive to reduce them when seeking benefits. For the Productivity Set, the risks relate to futile effort and unproductive use of valuable resources. For the Well-Being Set, the risks relate to a failure to notice dangers to personal and group security.

Productivity Set

Specialization reduces the risks inherent in impersonal effort. Moving down the diagonal, the need for focus increases.

  • Perspective-centredness calls for efforts to argue all sides and consider many viewpoints. Specialization in a particular topic or theme is essential to ensure that an adequate depth of knowledge can be achieved and credibility be attained.

Refusal to reduce risk ►Closed may lead to a powerful comprehensive view. However, the grander the scope, the more difficult it becomes to obtain employment, colleague support, public recognition or payment for output.

  • Cause-centredness calls for the effort of commitment, which implies specializing in a particular discipline (e.g. a profession), dogma (e.g. in politics or religion), or crusade (e.g. human rights, consumerism).

Refusal to reduce risk ►Closed means that a person's energies are diffused, their colleagues will doubt genuineness, and ideological positions may not be well-communicated.

  • Market-centredness is about hard work. Insofar as it is job-based, a person must become an expert or specialist in order to be in demand and to become irreplaceable within a firm. Insofar as it is enterprise-based, financial success depends on intimately knowing a specific market and monopolizing a well-defined niche.

Refusal to reduce risk ►Closed is seen in large conglomerates that defy the rule. Conglomerate formations goes into and out of fashion. Many develop through the vaulting ambition and massive borrowings of a particular person: until the empire is divested or blows up spectacularly when debts are called in. Conglomerates can be more stable where there is overt or covert government support of the leaders of the firm.

Well-being Set

These mentalities also manifest focus and effort in relation to handling social life, proximity and personal significance. Because risks relate to well-being issues, they are reduced differently.

Originally posted: July 2009