The pressure to report profits on a quarterly basis has driven some organizations to lose sight of the bigger picture. But as the long game’s list of increasingly vocal supporters are quick to point out, defining the future of stable growth has never been more important.
Quarterly capitalism, the term given to publicly traded businesses that have to publish performance data every three months, has become increasingly unpopular in recent years. The problem, its detractors say, is that it skews strategies in favor of quick wins and away from healthy, sustainable growth via projects that deliver strong ROI over time. At its worst, it encourages criminal behavior like that exhibited in Enron’s collapse and the casino-economics that caused the financial crisis of 2008-09. During a 2015 speech while on the US presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton risked the ire of institutions: “Quarterly capitalism as developed over recent decades is neither legally required or economically sound. It’s bad for business, bad for wages and bad for our economy,” she said. Oddly, her rival, the cutthroat capitalist Donald Trump, broadly agreed with this assessment. A year after winning the race for the White House, he met with global CEOs to discuss reducing reporting requirements on US companies from four to two occasions each year.
Originally by Dan Matthews for Tink: Act Magazine, read the full article here.
