business

Aspen Institute. 2015. While the immediate value of reducing these costs is easily seen on the company balance sheet, the lost revenue of reduced worker performance goes uncounted. What’s worse, all of these practices create arms-length relationships between employers and workers, weakening trust and dampening enthusiasm for the work.

This in turn reduces the likelihood that businesses will invest in productivity-enhancing training of the workforce. Recent research bears this out, noting that an “easy hire, easy fire” policy leads to diminished worker productivity and innovation.

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.

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.

New York Times. 2015. From Wall Street to Washington and in the towers of academia, people are buzzing about what some say is the pernicious focus in corporate America on short-term profits.

To understand the debate, it helps to understand the various forces that contribute to the pressures on companies to focus on short-term financial results. Those pressures are not just a product of one bad actor. It turns out that nearly everyone in the investment world plays a role in creating the challenges companies face in setting their sights on the far horizon.

New York Times. December 2019. Free-market capitalism won’t survive unless it makes structural changes toward long-term investing.

We live in an economy increasingly at odds with this truth. Short-term business practices are polluting our environment and harming our health and well-being for the sake of quick payouts.