single-minded: having only one purpose, goal, or interest; focused on one thing; having one driving purpose or resolve. First known use 1836.
Synonyms: bent (on or upon), bound, decisive, do-or-die, firm, hell-bent (on or upon), intent, purposeful, resolute, resolved, set. Antonyms: faltering, hesitant, indecisive, irresolute, undetermined, unresolved, vacillating, wavering, weak-kneed.
In American thinking to be single-minded is always positive. It means to be wholly focused.
Always positive?
Good decision making in the American context means a healthy balance between objective analysis and intuition.
Intuition: The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning; a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning. Late Middle English denoting spiritual insight or immediate spiritual communication. Latin intueri, to consider.
Empiricism. Observation. For Americans, intuition is experience-based knowledge, called on immediately. Intuition is more than a spontaneous thought, a “gut reaction”, a hunch. Americans trust the judgement of the experienced, the wise, of those “who have been there”.
But not to the exclusion of objective analysis. Americans are constantly coming up with new ways to quantify what is deeply human, what in its essence cannot be quantified. It’s a question of balance. When to go with the objective analysis, when with intuition? Can they be combined?
Star Trek. A brilliant television series. Late 1960s. Deeply human, created with little frills, eye-candy, special effects. Instead it tapped into the human imagination, the greatest source of special effects. Kirk is intuition. Spock is reason. Tension between the two. But it worked.
Let’s Stop “Throwing More Bodies” at the Problem, written by Adam Ziegler, August 8, 2013, on: smallfirminnovation(dot)com:”
“In my early days as a lawyer, there was one all-too-common phrase that drove me nuts: ‘just throw more bodies at it.’ I think it’s time to give this phrase a proper, final burial.
It’s insulting
Most new lawyers enter the market as smart, well-educated and highly motivated professionals. They’re not that different than you were a few years or decades ago. And most importantly, they’re people.
It’s dumb
Treating associates like cannon fodder is bad business. Associates work harder and better for supervisors that respect them.
It’s bad for clients
The ‘throw more bodies at it’ mentality is terrible for clients. Treating legal problem-solving as a brute force function of the quantity of lawyers and billable hours that can be brought to bear on a situation leads to flawed, wasteful, overly expensive work.”
In his 1893 book The Distribution of Wealth economist John R. Commons used the term human resource. The term was then used in the 1910s and 1920s. Workers were seen as a type of capital asset. E.W. Bakke revived “human resources” in its modern form was in 1958. Adam Smith defined human capital as follows:
“The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labor, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit.”
“… in the same light as a machine.”
The American customer expects the supplier to deliver a product or service as defined by the customer. The customer expects the supplier to orient himself fully towards their needs and to respond as quickly as possible. The supplier is expected to adapt to any change in scope. Examples
Americans are skeptical of business processes that attempt to replace human judgment. They believe that decision-making is inherently human. Drawing on personal and professional experience, intuition and judgment, a person or a group of persons makes the decision. Processes have neither experience, nor intuition nor judgment.
Analysis defines the situation, the options, their respective risks and benefits. Experience informs about how the situation could/should be dealt with. And intuition influences the decision.
Decision: A conclusion or resolution reached after consideration; the action or process of deciding something or of resolving a question; a formal judgment; the ability or tendency to make decisions quickly; decisiveness. From Latin decidere “determine”.
Analysis: Detailed examination of the elements or structure of something, typically as a basis for discussion or interpretation; the process of separating something into its constituent elements; the identification and measurement of the chemical constituents of a substance or specimen.
H.R. McMaster, February 2017 until April 2018 National Security Advisor under President Donald Trump, describes how critical it was at the beginning of his tenure to get clarity on scope. Listen to minutes 3:00 to 4:15 about “the nature of the problem”, and about “framing out the problem”:
McMaster earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He turned his dissertation on the strategy of the U.S. in the Vietnam War into his book entitled Dereliction of Duty.
With a Little Patience (Türelem, 2007). Although a short film and Hungarian by production, With a Little Patience has been recognized in German-speaking film circles for its meditative style and thematic resonance. The film’s narrative unfolds slowly, focusing on the repetitive, patient routine of an office clerk. The deliberate pacing and refusal to rush action or resolution underscore the virtue of patience, both in daily work and in facing larger, more dramatic events outside the office window. The film’s approach and critical acclaim highlight how patience and waiting can be central to both personal and collective outcomes.
Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. This business fable is about adapting quickly to change. The characters who succeed are those who make fast decisions and act, rather than waiting for perfect information or circumstances. The story is widely used in American business to encourage employees to embrace quick, adaptive decision-making.
“Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Everywhere”. By John Donohue. The New Yorker. May 31, 2015.
“Discussions about failure may come more easily in America in part because our businesspeople are so good at it. The failure rate for startups, using a yardstick in which investors lose everything (i.e., all of the company’s assets are liquidated), is between thirty and forty per cent, according to Shikhar Ghosh, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
The rate is seventy to eighty per cent if failure is defined as not meeting the projected return on investment, and ninety to ninety-five per cent if it is measured by failing to beat a declared projection.
Despite these statistics, Americans remain remarkably optimistic about the process—last year, venture-capital companies staked forty-eight billion dollars in pursuit of big returns. And the fact that these investments are concentrated in a relatively small number of companies has not seemed to inspire much fear in prospective entrepreneurs.
According to a study done by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a project run by Babson College and the London Business School, in 2014 among respondents between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four who were not already running their own businesses, just thirty per cent reported that fear of failure would stop them from starting one.
And more than half of those Americans surveyed believed that there are good opportunities to strike out on one’s own.