Strategy & the Real World

Ok, I threatened that I was going to write more about these subjects. And considering that I just came home from the pub and am in a provocative enough mood, I might as well type up whatever I please. At least I can just delete this afterwards (assuming that archive.org doesn't get around to indexing this first...).

So... Strategy? Just like decision-making, strategy is everywhere. You follow a certain strategy in regards to how you invest your money, whether or not it's deliberate or emerging in nature. Some people are more conscious about strategy than others. I find that I'm personally a person who has multiple alternative plans plotted out at any specific situation and then I intuitively make decisions according to the strategy that seems the most likely to bare fruit in whatever timeframe I deem fit for the strategy at hand.

This is all fine and dandy for school. My progress at school is essentially only limited by my personal capabilities and my time. In essence, I'm the bottleneck. If something goes wrong, it's because of me or because of my other undertakings. So the responsibility is clear. Work goes into this same category, although interpersonal dependence takes a slight role in this environment. If some task depends on some other person, you can't finish your task until the other person has finished his. To make things simple. More complex situations, of course, occur. Personal life is a completely different animal. Superficially it seems similar to the work environment; the common denominator is that both involve people. The fundamental difference, however, is that in the work life you can assume that people will act more or less opportunistically and attempt to maximize their own personal profit. The Economic Man (homo economicus) succeeds in this environment, thanks to his rationality and capabilities to objectively analyze situations and calculate the optimal strategies for each situation (according to his own perceptions).

Personal, inter-personal (non-work) relationships are in fact the difficult part. This reveals the true nature of people. There's quite possibly no such thing as homo economicus. Rational people fail when faced with apparent chaos and irrationality. Why do stock markets crash? Yeah, the same reason at hand there, too... Inter-personal relationships, as mentioned, are the difficult thing. You can apply whatever schools of strategy you want there, but the fundamental flaw that's still present is that (at least in my opinion) it's not a game. The same laws do not entirely apply. Foreign concepts (such as altruism) emerge in these situations. Granted, some clever economist will of course find a way to model altruism into the equation, but the thing, from my point of view, is that people act more randomly in this world. Chaos and gut instinct (uneducated intuition) reign supreme here. I greatly fear that I have made a truely stupid mistake.