314. Leave Room For Long-Term Thinking
Leadership learnings on the importance of planning for the long-term
What drives your business today may not deliver the same results in the future.
Customer needs change. Competitors change. Markets change.
Finding future opportunities for growth takes investment and time. If you are only planning for the near term, you are aren’t leaving room to discover and develop for the future.
Great leaders think long-term and make time to plan for research and experimentation to deliver future business growth.
Here are five great resources on the topic to review this week.
Monday:
Review the article, Foundations for Growth: How to Identify and Build Disruptive New Businesses:
Most managers understand that significant, new, sustainable growth comes from creating new markets and ways of competing. But few of them make such investments. Why? Because when times are good and core businesses are growing robustly, starting new generations of growth ventures seems unnecessary; when times are bad and mature businesses are under attack, investments to create new growth businesses can’t send enough profit to the bottom line quickly enough to satisfy investor pressure for a fast turnaround.
Clayton M. Christensen, Mark W. Johnson and Darrell K. Rigby
Tuesday:
Watch Jeff Bezos talk about thinking in longer time frames:
Wednesday
Read this Mckinsey article on The Granularity of Growth.
Our research on the revenue growth of large companies suggests that executives should “de-average” their view of markets and develop a granular perspective on trends, future growth rates, and market structures. Insights into subindustries, segments, categories, and micromarkets are the building blocks of portfolio choice. Companies will find this approach to growth indispensable in making the right decisions about where to compete.
Mehrdad Baghai, Sven Smit and S. Patrick Viguerie
Thursday
Read Jim Collins's introduction from 1995 on building companies that last:
Having a great idea or being a charismatic visionary leader is “time telling;” building a company that can prosper far beyond the tenure of any single leader and through multiple product life cycles is “clock building.” Those who build visionary companies tend to be clock builders. Their primary accomplishment is not the implementation of a great idea, the expression of a charismatic personality, or the accumulation of wealth. It is the company itself and what it stands for.
Jim Collins
Friday
Watch the following video by Dorie Clark on how to be a long term thinker in a short term world:
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