The Costs of Scarcity and the Benefits of Abundance

Ritchie-Dunham, James, and Michael Puleo. 2012. The Costs of Scarcity and the Benefits of Abundance, White Paper, Belchertown, MA: Institute for Strategic Clarity, June.

Abundance – more than you can use – provides ample direct benefits to any organization. This abundance already exists in the potential and development of your strategic resources, in the unfulfilled possibilities in your organizational structures and processes, and in your stakeholders’ perceived value of the relationship with you.

Abundance is a desired state for any organization. While this seems obvious, direct measurement of this abundance is not. Without measurement, a company cannot assess the benefit-cost of investing in abundance-based practices. The quality movement shows us the way. The measurement of the cost of no-quality provides a minimal estimate of the benefit of quality. Similarly, this paper proposes a framework for the costs of no-abundance or the costs of scarcity. The framework is then applied to four cases, making direct measurement of the benefit of abundance obvious.