What if all our strategic choices played out and paid off just as we planned?  Or if they didn’t, they at least failed quickly with quickly with no doubt as to why?

Yeah, right.

The business reality is that important strategies often take time to sort out, and even then it’s not always clear what worked and what didn’t.

Take DaimlerChrsyler, for example:  Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler in 1998.  Now it’s looking like they’re going to sell.  Nine years and tens of thousands of jobs later, and it looks like they’re going to cut their losses.

Or take Boeing vs. Airbus:  Boeing bet billions that the future was in designing and building planes for hub-and-spoke travel, while Airbus bet on point-to-point.  In 2003-2005, it looked like Airbus was going to eat Boeing’s lunch.  Now?  Airbus and the monster A380 are behind schedule, over budget, and in the stock market doldrums.  Never give up, indeed.

Mind you, DaimlerChrsyler, Boeing, and Airbus are some of the world’s largest corporations.  Their big decisions are made through the aggregate wisdom (and idiosyncrasies) of many, many people including the marketplace which they cannot control.

But how about the rest of us who have sole responsibility for our companies’ big decisions?  When things get tough, how do we decide whether to "cut our losses" and not "throw good money after bad" or whether to, "never never never give up"?  And how does our ADDexec nature — with our power to see possibilities, our tendencies to hyper-focus, our predelictions for tying emotion to outcomes, our gravitation toward risk taking — help or hinder our ability to decide and then do the best thing?

More on this topic soon.