Losing the battle to win the war

When I was in Boston recently I got talking to a New York banker who had responsibility for running a large team, a number of which were based in India. He was every bit the stereotype of a New York Banker. He told me that his solution to the high rates of attrition that one can often see in that part of the world was not to try and create an interesting career experience which would encourage them to stay, but to set up a permanent recruitment function and regularly fire people, even those who were performing, before they got too comfortable and starting looking for other jobs. An interesting theory indeed and one which he obviously told me was working fantastically well for him... However the older I get, the more I believe that in the pursuit of a given goal, so long as you never lose sight of the ultimate end point of where you want to get to, the more you can get agreement with others (which obviously takes a bit more time and absolutely includes accepting to lose some battles along the way), the greater the chance of winning the overall war and making the final solution stick (which are of course two very different things). At the end of our conversation we shook hands and agreed to disagree. I wished him well on his hamster wheel journey of Indian recruitment.