Satisificing

I haven’t thought about the term Satisficing since my days as a programming major at Carnegie Mellon, but the topic came up again and I realized that I lean towards a satisficing strategy most of the time.

In a nutshell: Satisficers are content to make less than optimal decisions, on the theory that most of the time any decision will be good enough, and the cost in time to produce an optimal result is higher than the risk of making an insufficient choice. Maximizers seek as much information as possible before making a decision, with the confidence that the decision will be better than it would have been otherwise.

I realize now that much of my frustration with the people who frequently give me business advice is that they are maximizers and I am a satisficer. But this doesn’t answer the more important question: is satisficing a valid business strategy for the art sales aspect of my business? In the commercial world, photographers usually need to bid on projects, and that seems to imply that maximizers will be more successful.

This tangents into the larger question of whether my career goal is really about maximizing profit. The very term suggests a preference for a strategy which is foreign to me. I can’t imagine many investors would be willing to support a company dedicated to satisficing their profit goals. On the other hand, I’m not a corporation, so does this really apply to my business?

It’s a big question, and one deserving of far more thought than I currently have time to give it.

Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. Please leave any comments there.