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The Opportunity Cost of Bad Business Decisions

An in-depth look at how dysfunctional behaviors and personalities can negatively impact business decisions, imposing unseen opportunity costs that hinder competitiveness, innovation, and advancement over time. Outlines proactive mitigation tactics for hiring, accountability, and modeling transformative leadership.

GUIDE

Contrarians

Drama Queens/Kings

Contrarians, by nature, possess a unique ability to constantly question everything. While this

could sometimes lead to innovative and creative solutions, it most often results in frustra-

tion when their skepticism is not balanced with a proper understanding of the context and

potential consequences. In some cases, contrarians may dismiss well-reasoned arguments

simply for the sake of being different, leading teams to adopt suboptimal strategies that fail

to capitalize on available opportunities.

Impact: The opportunity cost associated with contrarians is significant, particularly in fast-

paced and competitive environments. When contrarians hinder the decision-making pro-

cess by refusing to accept the consensus, disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, valuable

time and resources are wasted. Furthermore, the constant need to disagree with others can

detract from the exploration of genuinely innovative ideas, stunting the growth and prog-

ress of an organization.

Flamboyant and theatrical when expressing even minor opinions, drama queens/kings relish

opportunities to loudly hold court, ensuring all attention focuses squarely on their expand-

ing repertoire of grievances and exaggerated accomplishments. Emotions on full display yet

readily weaponized to silence others, they view deference as their due while considering

moderated tones a personal affront from obvious rivals.

Impact: By placing interpersonal conflict over shared objectives, drama kings/queens condi-

tion teams to tiptoe around their delicate egos lest everyday issues unexpectedly escalate

into breathless accusations. As meetings devolve into overly long airings of perceived slights

and old grudges, focus blurs from executing decisions toward mitigating further explosive

outbursts. These individuals can eat up enormous time from management as they work in-

ternal compliance mechanisms to serve their own flawed perceived view of the world.

$500B 78% percent of employees spend at least 3-6

hours each week dealing with drama queens and kings

costing American companies more than $500 billion

annually.

(Huffpost.com, 2023)