Tackling Economic Security Governance

If you’ve ever played chess, you know that each move you make has to be the best move. At one level, this is painfully obvious — after all, who would choose to make a terrible move instead of a better one? — but it’s illustrative of an important concept.

Specifically, the core reason it’s true is that each individual move in a game like chess comes with an associated “opportunity cost.” Making a suboptimal move represents a lost opportunity to do something better: say, a game-winning move that you could have made but didn’t.

I’m bringing this up because establishing a security program is in many respects exactly the same. We don’t have infinite resources (money, time and focus). This is a truism, but it implies that everything we do comes at the cost of something else — what we could have applied our resources to but didn’t.