Opportunism

I’ve been planning my future since I was a little girl. Somethings that I decided was that I wanted to be an anesthesiologist, have an extravagant wedding, live in a big house, and travel the world. I would spend most of my time planning all the small details such as where I wanted to go to school, what hospital I wanted to work at, what style wedding ring I wanted, etc., but as I got older, I was presented opportunities that altered the original plan for better and for worse. 

There are different ways that opportunism arises in the workplace. One example is investing in yourself and something you believe will become an asset. This can mean many things, but specifically improving human capital and cospecialized assets. Improving human capital can be demonstrated by going to college to learn a new subject or furthering your education at the graduate level. If you are not interested in attending a school, there are workshops that act as a crash course to tech you many skills in improving the day-to-day activities. Cospecialized assets is defined as two assets that are most productive when used together and lose much of their value if used separately to produce independent products or services. One example of this might be a specific technology patent and the way it is marketed/ distributed among companies. There are some challenges when it comes to taking an opportunity, such as hold up and an example of this can be explained by the prisoner dilemma. 


The prisoner’s dilemma is a decision paradox where two individuals act in their own self-interest, but it does not produce the most optimal outcome. In this example two firms have the choice to advertise or not to advertise. If they both advertise, each firm will lose $100 million because they will pay for the advertisement and not attract new customers, but if they both decide not to advertise, each will gain $100 million (the amount they saved not purchasing the advertisement). However, if they agree to not advertise and one breaks the agreement, they will gain $1 billion and the other will lose $500 million. So, the question is, what would you do? On a smaller scale, people within a company face this challenge by taking the blame for a detrimental mistake. Would you single someone out and say they were the reason for the mistake and potentially put yourself in a better standing, or say it was a collective mistake and everyone will receive some of the backlashes?

 An example of this was when I was training someone at our swim company, I allowed her to physically manipulate the child’s stroke. While there were many other children in the class, I thought it would be fine to let her focus on one child and I will attend to the rest of the class. Since I know she had been shadowing for over 30 hours (which is roughly half the required hours plus she had to attend classes to learn about manipulations and teaching), I thought she could handle the responsibility. Roughly 20 seconds later I hear the child come up from the water crying and frightened. I asked what was wrong and the child then stated that she couldn’t breathe and that was because the employee was not giving the child the chance to come up to breathe. Now the question is do I take full responsibility because it was my class, does the new employee take responsibility because she was the one doing the manipulations, or are we collectively at fault? When I was explaining the situation to my boss, I decided it was both our faults for a couple reasons:

1.     The Nash equilibrium would not benefit anyone because if both of us say we are not at fault then it would be bad on both our parts

2.     If she took total blame, she might have not continued (or potentially fired)

3.     If I took the blame the family might have not trusted me, and they discontinued lessons at our facility.

4.     If we both took responsibility, we both would receive some repercussions, but it was a learning opportunity for her, and I would keep a better eye on the new-hires. 

I would say that having my reputation tainted played a role on my decision making. In almost all 4 circumstances, I was going to lower my reputation whether it was with the family, the new-hire, or my boss, but since it was the first time something like this has happened in one of my classes, I was willing to take some responsibility because it seemed like the more mature thing to do. All in all, opportunism presents itself in many ways, but deciding what you do with it can determine your future and where you stand with a company, coworkers, and customers.