I have been watching with great interest the successes and failures of different state and local coronavirus vaccination plans. I am struck by the inability to adjust to changing conditions brought on by a bureaucratic mindset. It varies greatly from the “flexibility is the key to air power” mindset that I formed in my days as a fighter pilot.

From my observations, bureaucrats make plans. Then they have trouble adjusting when it turns out a program is not working as forecast. Vaccine distribution provides a good example of this. In most areas, healthcare workers and frontline safety (law enforcement and firefighters) were/are the first to get vaccinated. Next would be the elderly and those at risk due to medical conditions.

One problem has been that fewer than the expected numbers of doses have reached local levels, resulting in it taking weeks to inoculate group one, while people in the next-to-be-vaccinated groups are dying in record numbers.

Here is an anecdotal example: A very large, very famous, very rich Midwestern medical center decided to vaccinate all employees before doing vaccinations for the local community. However, this medical center has tens of thousands of employees, and it will be weeks before the medical center will start helping the people it actually serves. I am told many residents are very upset by the choice to take care of employees first. It is bad PR at best, and at worst, those most in need of vaccination to stay alive may not get vaccinated in time. Yet, the bureaucrats at this medical center want to stick with their plan.

While I am just one person and not a bureaucracy of thousands, I recently caught myself in the same unproductive mindset. Here is the tale.

Every month I ask my Dividend Hunter Insiders to send in a stock that they’d like for me to research for our group. I select one of the submissions and do a deep-dive review and analysis of the stock. One stock showed up every month, and I would ignore it because of a long-held “issue” I had with the company’s dividend policy. This month, I decided to ignore my feelings about the company and fulfill a subscriber’s request to review the stock.

As I went through my stock analysis process, I soon realized that this particular stock was one of the best net lease REITs out there. My beef with the company was a minor item compared to the very attractive investment potential of the stock. For several years, I had ignored an excellent income stock due to some petrified belief.

That stock will be a new recommendation to my Dividend Hunter subscribers in the February issue. I learned my lesson about staying open-minded and let facts, not preconceptions, tell the story. In this case flexibility is the key to dividend investing power.