In the great diverse business jungle, there's one predator that’s more dangerous than a rogue or incompetent CEO or a shifting market. It’s small, it’s quiet, and it devours the future with surgical precision. It’s called short-term thinking.

It feels productive. It sounds urgent. But make no mistake—it’s sabotage, dressed up as strategy.

For some organisations the heartbeat of the business is no longer the customer, the innovation pipeline, or the staff morale. It’s the calendar.

The leadership becomes addicted to the dopamine rush of marginal gains, constantly prodding the system for growth, pushing unreasonable returns regardless of its cost to long-term health of the people involved or the health of the organisation.

And that’s the tragedy. Long-term thinking doesn’t scream. It’s the quiet voice whispering: “Build for resilience.” “Develop your people.” “Don’t sacrifice the future on the altar of now.”

Short-termism isn't just intellectually lazy. It's operationally lethal.

•  Training and development? Cut. Too slow on ROI.
•  R&D pipeline? Deferred. Let’s wait until the next cycle. Or the next guy handle it.
•  Customer experience upgrades? Too expensive right now.
•  Preventive maintenance? A luxury we’ll address after the bonus cycle.

You end up with an organisation that is well-dressed, highly profitable, and thoroughly hollow on the inside—like a chocolate bunny that’s been out in the sun too long.

The real payoff in business lies not in pulling the lever every 90 days, but in planting orchards of trust, competence, and innovation that grow over years.

To break the cycle of hyper-now obsession, organisations must:

•  Design metrics that reflect system health, not just transactional success.
•  Reward delayed gratification, where leaders who don’t overreact are valued.
•  Invest in redundancy and resilience, not just efficiency.
•  Think in feedback loops, not snapshots.

Ask yourself: Is your organisation building for the grandchildren of your current customers? Or are you just trying to get through next Tuesday’s budget call?

One view creates legacy. The other merely buys time.

There’s a place for rapid iteration, agile sprints, and quick pivots. But if those become your only strategy, you’ve swapped long-term stewardship for short-term manipulation.

True leaders resist the applause of the immediate when it threatens the applause of history. They know that the scoreboard matters—but the game they’re playing must be infinite in nature, not round-based like a game of darts.

They build organisations that can outlast them.

That’s the only legacy worth leaving. 

Smart Questions to think about:

Prompt 1: What trade-offs are you tolerating today that would be unthinkable if your goal was thriving ten years from now?

Prompt 2: How can you re-orient your leadership culture to prioritise system health over performance theatrics?