Planning for the long term is a game for losers.
In a world where we have difficulty planning what will happen next month, locking yourself into a long term plan, which allocates resources, and makes binding decisions about the required capabilities, and how to build and deploy them, is crazy.
By contrast, long term thinking, retaining your perspective for the longer term, but being able to be agile in the shorter term, makes way more sense.
The makeup of the top 100 companies has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, and is unrecognisable from the top 100 of 1990. This should give us a clue.
Corporations of the 20th century grew by building scale, marketing, operational, geographic and financial. In the quest for scale they also built silos, bureaucracies, and cultures of personal safety, risk aversity, and dependence on what worked in the past to continue to work into the future.
Successful corporations now must be much more agile and responsive to change, even when they are huge. The necessary process of devolving both authority and responsibility down the tree to where the interaction with operations really happens, makes them look more like a collection of smaller businesses than a corporate monolith.
The new model works. Perhaps the greatest example of this management about-face, while not of a commercial corporation, is the change in the US military retold in Stanley McCrystal’s great book Team of Teams .
It is unstated, but the current political argument in Australia about the tax cuts legislation is an example of the failure of long term thinking. It substitutes a flimsy long term plan for intelligent long term thinking. Even worse, it is long term planning with an objective that is political, rather than economic or responsible. It is a wedge job on the opposition, and is a great example of why we do not trust politicians, and politics. We know such a long term plan, legislating for something as fundamentally important as a tax framework is nonsense. However, we accept the value of long term thinking, recognising the need to consider the manner in which tax rates make us competitive with other economies, at the same time as raising the revenue to deliver the community outcomes we all demand.
