When Leaders Only Have One Bullet, They’re a Lot More Careful About What They Aim At

There is a peculiar thing that happens when resources become scarce: judgment improves.

Give someone unlimited ammunition and every target begins to look tempting. But give them only one round and suddenly the questions become much more serious. Is that really the target? Is it worth engaging? What happens if I miss? Is there a better opportunity coming? Do I need this round more than I need to solve the problem immediately in front of me?

Scarcity has a way of imposing discipline. That lesson applies well beyond ammunition. It applies to money, time, organizational energy, political capital, military power, and perhaps most importantly, attention. When we believe we have an unlimited supply of something, we tend to spend it casually. When we understand that the supply is finite, we become much more deliberate about where we aim.

I learned this repeatedly during my time in the Army. It’s true that military organizations possess enormous resources compared with most organizations in society. But at the tactical level, resources never feel unlimited. And resourcing is often cyclical; when I was a platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division in the mid-1990s, we had to ration things like toilet paper in the barracks and copier machine use in the battalion headquarters. Even during the financial free-for-all of the GWOT years, there were only so many aircraft available for a mission, so many hours before darkness, so many people who can be placed on a task, so much ammunition that can be carried, and so much physical and mental energy that soldiers can expend before performance begins to deteriorate. Every decision to employ a resource somewhere is also a decision not to employ it somewhere else.

That is why prioritization is one of the most important things leaders do. Unfortunately, leaders frequently confuse prioritization with making a list. We identify Priority 1, Priority 2, Priority 3, and Priority 4, and then proceed to demand that all four be accomplished simultaneously and to the same standard. That is not prioritization. That is numbering. That is comfortable. But it’s not really leadership, it’s merely management.

Real prioritization hurts. It means deciding that something worthwhile will not get done because something more important must. It means accepting risk in one area so resources can be concentrated in another. It means telling good people with good ideas that their projects will have to wait. Sometimes it means deliberately allowing a problem to remain unsolved. If everything is a priority, nothing is.

The same principle applies in business. Organizations routinely complain that they do not have enough people, money, or time while simultaneously dispersing those resources across dozens of initiatives. Every new project seems individually reasonable. Someone proposes a new product, committee, reporting requirement, training program, meeting, or strategic initiative, and the cost appears small when viewed in isolation. So the organization says yes.

But organizations rarely calculate the cumulative cost of all those yeses.Eventually, talented employees spend their days moving between meetings about priorities instead of accomplishing them. Leaders wonder why projects take so long. Workers become frustrated because they are accountable for outcomes without being given enough uninterrupted time to produce them. The organization responds by creating another meeting to improve synchronization. More ammunition is expended. Few targets are destroyed.

The problem is not always a shortage of resources. Sometimes the problem is an absence of fire discipline. This is particularly important with a resource that leaders rarely account for properly: attention.

A commander, CEO, editor, professor, or parent can only pay serious attention to a limited number of things. Yet modern life encourages us to behave as though attention is inexhaustible. Email, text messages, social media, meetings, news alerts, dashboards, reports, and administrative requirements all compete for the same finite cognitive resource. Every time a leader focuses intensely on one issue, something else necessarily receives less attention. That is not a personal failure. It is mathematics.

The question, therefore, is not how to pay attention to everything. The question is what deserves your attention most. There is a strategic version of this problem as well. Powerful countries are particularly susceptible to believing that because they can do something, they should do it. Military power creates options. Economic power creates leverage. Diplomatic influence creates opportunities. But possessing those capabilities does not eliminate opportunity costs.

Every commitment consumes something. A military formation deployed to one theater cannot simultaneously be somewhere else. A billion dollars spent on one capability cannot be spent twice. Weapons transferred from existing stocks have to be replaced. Diplomatic capital spent pressuring one partner may affect cooperation on another issue. Even credibility, despite the way we sometimes talk about it, is not an infinitely renewable resource.

Strategy therefore requires something harder than identifying desirable outcomes. It requires choosing among desirable outcomes. That distinction matters because almost every proposed use of resources can be justified when considered independently. The school needs funding. The combatant command needs another capability. The company needs another employee. The university needs another program. The headquarters needs another reporting requirement. The organization needs another initiative. Maybe all of those things are true. But “this would be useful” is not the same thing as “this is the best use of the next dollar, person, hour, or unit of attention.”

The one-bullet mindset forces the second question. Imagine walking into your office every morning knowing that you have only one metaphorical round to fire that day. You can solve one major problem. You can personally intervene in one issue. You can spend your political capital on one fight. You can demand exceptional effort from your organization once. What would you shoot at? To paraphrase that great sage, Eminem, if you had one shot or one opportunity what would you shoot at, and what would you let slip?

That question would probably change how many leaders spend their days. Some would stop fighting battles that do not matter. Others would realize they are spending extraordinary amounts of energy correcting minor imperfections while major problems remain untouched. Some would discover that they have been firing at the targets that are easiest to hit rather than the ones that matter most.

There is a reason for that. Easy targets provide immediate satisfaction.

Answering an email feels productive. Correcting a formatting mistake produces a visible result. Calling someone about a minor administrative problem allows a leader to say, “I fixed it.” Solving difficult organizational problems is different. Those problems may take months or years. Progress is difficult to measure. Success may belong to someone else. So we shoot at what is close. We get the alligators that are closest to the boat.

The best leaders I have known resisted that temptation. They understood that leadership is partly the art of deciding what not to do. They conserved organizational energy for the things that mattered. They tolerated small imperfections so they could concentrate on consequential problems. And when they finally committed resources, people understood that the target mattered.

There is another benefit to scarcity: it encourages better information. If you have a thousand rounds, you can afford to shoot at something you merely suspect is a target. If you have one, you want to know.

That means observing longer. Asking another question. Challenging an assumption. Waiting for the situation to develop. Seeking information from the people closest to the problem. Considering second- and third-order effects. In other words, scarcity can make us think.

This does not mean leaders should become paralyzed by uncertainty. There are moments when acting quickly with incomplete information is exactly what leadership requires. Nor should organizations artificially starve themselves of resources in the belief that deprivation automatically produces excellence. Sometimes insufficient resources simply produce failure. The lesson is different. It is this:

Act as though your resources are more finite than they appear.

Because eventually they are.

Budgets run out. People become exhausted. Political capital disappears. Organizations lose patience. Equipment wears down. Time expires. Opportunities close. And attention spent on something trivial cannot be recovered and spent again on something important.

There is an old temptation in leadership to demonstrate seriousness by doing more: more initiatives, more meetings, more requirements, more programs, more activity. But activity is not the same thing as effect. Sometimes the most disciplined decision a leader can make is not to fire. Wait. Observe. Preserve the resource. Let the unimportant target pass. Then, when something appears that truly matters, you still have a round in the chamber.

Because when you only have one bullet, you’ve got to be a lot more careful about what you shoot at.
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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.