Funny you should mention this. I was thinking about this, but didn't know that it had a name--Eisenhower Principal--when I read an article in the NYT Magazine back in March.

The article was by Freakonomics authors Duber and Levitt about SmileTrain. Let me briefly summarize. Operation Smile sent doctors to poor parts of the world for cleft-repair surgery. One of the members of Operation Smile realized that they would never repair all cleft palates with this approach. The doctors always left without helping all the children. By stepping back and seeing the problem differently, SmileTrain was born.

SmileTrain took a different approach. They trained local doctors on doing the surgery affordably. This greatly sped the number of surguries and is allowing a host of other benefits, like employment and income for local doctors (at a fraction of the cost of sending in teams of doctors from developed countries).

Anyway, maybe this should be called the Eisenhower approach to strategy execution.

Thanks for the correction. I have gone ahead and posted the correction in the original entry. Unfortunately, this won't be my last grammar error.

Ted Jackson