Harvard Business Review. 2015. Thirty years ago, no less a business guru than Peter Drucker weighed in, skewering short-termism in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
“Everyone who has worked with American management can testify that the need to satisfy the pension fund manager’s quest for higher earnings next quarter, together with the panicky fear of the raider, constantly pushes top managements toward decisions they know to be costly, if not suicidal, mistakes,” he wrote.
The Atlantic. 2016. There was a time, half a century ago, when what was good for many American corporations tended to also be good for America. Companies invested in their workers and new technologies, and as a result, they prospered and their employees did too.
Now, a growing group of business leaders is worried that companies are too concerned with short-term profits, focused only on making money for shareholders. As a result, they’re not investing in their workers, in research, or in technology—short-term costs that would reduce profits temporarily. And this, the business leaders say, may be creating long-term problems for the nation.
New York Times. June 2022. Germany’s economy minister triggered the second stage of a contingency plan a week after Russia cut back on gas to Europe, sending prices soaring and raising fears of shortages.
Germany warned residents and businesses on Thursday that the country was in a natural gas crisis that could worsen in coming months.
“The situation is serious, and winter will come,” Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, told reporters at a news conference in Berlin. He said the government had triggered the second stage of its three-step energy gas plan; the next stage would permit the government to begin gas rationing.
“Even if you don’t feel it yet: We are in a gas crisis,” he said. “Gas is a scarce commodity from now on. Prices are already high, and we have to be prepared for further increases. This will affect industrial production and become a big burden for many consumers.”
What is a business continuity plan? SAP’s global HR value advisor, Chiara Bersano, has a unique perspective on the question. In 1999, she was working for a global company that operated a factory in Izmir, Turkey, when a devastating earthquake ultimately left more than 17,000 dead and 250,000 homeless. Her company’s employees, however, fared better than most.
So, what is contingency planning? If you ask Bersano, it’s creating an emergency-response framework that results in retaining a healthy, motivated, dedicated workforce during and after crises.
“The power of relationship building from a crisis is extreme,” Bersano says. “It’s building a relationship based on trust with the employees.”
Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.
In a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. An extension of this concept is the agile enterprise, which refers to an organization that uses key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success. Business agility is the outcome of organizational intelligence.
Forbes. 2021. Life and work can at times prove to be exceedingly difficult, as the past year plus has shown, and we can all be forgiven if, in our current circumstances, we look not towards the future but the next moment of relief.
All the platitudes about tough times making for tough people are well and good, but they’re easier to offer from the outside rather than during a trying period. Let’s face it, this period of uncertainty is seemingly ever-ending. In these circumstances, it’s easy to see how people can make decisions aimed at the short-term amelioration of their problems that might work against their long-term interests.
The Guardian. April 2022. Firms will go bust’: Germany prepares for a future without Russian gas.
In Germany, they call it “Day X”. Businesses up and down the land are making contingency plans for what is seen as a growing likelihood that Russian gas will stop flowing into Europe’s biggest economy.
“It would be a disaster – one which would have seemed almost unthinkable just two months ago, but which right now feels like a very realistic prospect,” the owner of a hi-tech mechanical engineering company in western Germany said. The firm produces everything from battery cases for electric cars to train clutch systems.
The speaker did not want to be named, or for his company to be identified, in part for fear, he said, of appearing to support Russia’s war by making the case that if the gas is turned off, his century-old business “will likely not survive”.
But he says he is in a deep quandary and feeling very vulnerable, as he is not only heavily reliant on gas – the cost of which has already soared – but also on metals such as nickel and aluminium, much of which comes from Russia.
A plan is a detailed proposal or scheme for achieving a specific goal. In Germany, as in any other country, a plan can serve a variety of purposes, depending on the context in which it is being used. Some possible purposes of a plan might include:
Plans can be created for personal, business, or organizational purposes, and can range from simple to-do lists to complex, multi-faceted proposals.
Source: ChatGPT. Question: For Germans what is the purpose of a plan?
Vox. 2016. Hillary Clinton has made short-term thinking in corporate America — also known as “quarterly capitalism,” a reference to the pressure companies feel to meet quarterly earnings predictions — a central issue in her campaign.
That issue has been bubbling beneath the surface of policy discussion for years, but it’s gained fresh attention as influential investors such as Warren Buffett and Lawrence Fink (of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset holder), and politicians like Vice President Joe Biden, have stepped up to warn of the perils to our economy of turning away from a long-term perspective.
Americans and Germans have very different expectations about how to manage interpersonal conflicts when they arise, which can lead to huge misunderstandings. As part of an ongoing series of articles, an American consultant living in Germany offers some advice.
When Germans and American collaborate, there will be conflict. This is normal. However, their respective approaches to conflict resolution differ. These differences, if not understood and properly balanced, can hinder just and lasting conflict resolution. And unresolved conflict threatens collaboration and success.