John Maynard Keynes’s best-known saying is surely “In the long run we are all dead.” It is a total fallacy that, as Keynes implies, optimizing the short term creates the right long-term future.
It is a value question whether a business should be run for short-term results or for “the long run.” Financial analysts believe that businesses can be run for both, simultaneously. Successful businessmen know better. To be sure, everyone has to produce short-term results. But in any conflict between short-term results and long-term growth, one company decides in favor of long-term growth, and another company decides such a conflict in favor of short-term results. Again, this is not primarily a disagreement on economics. It is fundamentally a value conflict regarding the function of a business and the responsibility of management.
ACTION POINT: Does your organization sacrifice the long-term wealth-producing capacity of the enterprise to produce short-term results? Discuss how you can break out of this trap and still produce short-term profits.
The Ecological Vision
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* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker