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MAKING A CAREER OUT OF STRATEGIZING
Kathlyn Q. Barrozo
Class of 1991, University of Santo Tomas
B.S. Medical Technology
The greatest strategists win the biggest wars. Often guided by sheer instinct and the ability to foresee further
than most people, such individuals possess gifts to plan and to bring forth whatever it is they conceptualize.
They are not daunted by setbacks, because they readily have back-up plans should their present ones backfire.
Such people are enviable: they seem to have it easy and all.
But ask any strategic planner or events coordinator and they will always tell you one thing; strategizing takes
much effort no matter how small the event or how inconsequential the purpose. Even those who have been
doing it for so many years often find strategizing really taxing work that requires tedious or often repetitive
tasks that don’t have identical results all the time. Every experience is new, every outcome a fresh take on the
more recent ones. Strategizing requires years, months, weeks or days of nerve-wracking expectations and
anticipation. Nope, strategizing is definitely not for the fainthearted.
How many times has this particular writer spent sleepless nights planning a certain event or strategizing for a
specific undertaking, only to experience setbacks once the plan is set into motion? The very concept of
strategizing alone is challenge enough, what more when all you have planned for and prayed for only crumble
before your very eyes? Perhaps, the only thing that has saved me from insanity during those times was my faith,
that plus the belief that after the rain, there will always be sunshine. Not floods, like we used to say when we
were students and like we currently say because of the seemingly decreasing level of our terra firma. But I am
digressing again.
This is why each and every plan of action I carry out always comes with a fervent prayer to an Omnipotent
Presence that His will be done. By submitting myself to a Divine Will, I lessen the chances of feeling too much
heartbreak should my strategizing fail to produce results that I crave. Furthermore, I find it good advice to
always have a fallback, something I can hold on to should worse come to worst, or when push comes to shove.
That way, I save myself a tremendous amount of hair pulling and tongue gnashing.
This is not to say, though, that we should all learn to be pessimistic. Au contraire, it is to teach us how to be
optimistic. Once we have a safety net in place, we learn to hope that everything goes well. If they don’t, there’s
always another way out. Such is the concept of truly effective strategizing. No regrets, take no prisoners, and
leave nothing behind. All bases covered, see?
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1.
Are there particular individuals you admire for being effective strategists? What makes these people
great?
2.
How do you strategize for anything in your life? Cite a specific event/situation and outline what it is
you exactly do for it.
3.
Even the best-laid plans often get setbacks along the way. How do you cope with failure, in such
cases?
4.
Why is strategizing difficult?
5.
Would you want to become an events planner, financial advisor or strategic coordinator? Why or why
not?