The Stockdale Paradox

"Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties - and confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.." - Vice Admiral James Stockdale

One of our more recent members on our forums had posted this quote as the Stockdale Paradox. Doing a little bit of research, I came across a lot of references to it. In his book, Stockdale used it to identify why he survived and others did not. He also describes how this is different than optimism in that you must confront your current reality.

Two reasons why this quote intrigued me. First, I met Jim Stockdale when I was a teenager right after he had been released from the Vietnamese POW camp. My father was Operations Officer on the USS Enterprise and on their way back from the far east they picked up some of the sons of the crew at Hawaii (no females in those day) to ride the ship back to the mainland US. On board as well were some of the POWs just released as part of the Paris peace agreement including RAdm Stockdale who was the highest ranking POW during his captivity. He spoke at a Sunday service in the fo'c'sle of the ship around some of these concepts. What I recollected from the time was he seemed a bit distant (wouldn't you being in a prison camp?) and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be him. Just the image of the man - tired, proud, defiant, but humble - stuck with me more than his words. (What a surprise when I saw him as Ross Perot's running mate.)

Perhaps I did remember his words though, which leads to the second reason for finding it intriguing. When I first came to Europe, I was aware of ex-patriots remorse of having made such a severe choice as to move to a different country. I kept repeating to myself: "Expect the worst - hope for the best." Years later, when business conditions got bad, I would just repeat to myself Nietzsche's "What does not kill me, makes me stronger." The Stockdale Paradox sums up both more succinctly.

Without diminishing the accomplishments of Stockdale's shear survival, the Stockdale Paradox is something that every entrepreneur should be prepared to embrace. I have been described as overly optimistic. I do try to temper that in realism of conditions. We go through scenario planning, what-ifs and try to imagine the unimaginable. But faith that all will work out in the end leads us to seek positive outcomes even if they are a hard slog. Things are great at Alfresco right now, but we can't assume that they will always will be. We must plan to confront problems as they occur.