An excerpt from the Fast Company article “3 unexpected benefits to shifting your mindset about time” by Dorie Clark:
A longer time frame lets you accomplish more meaningful goals
My friend Jonathan Brill, an innovation expert who’s the author of the book Rogue Waves, identifies one of the worst hidden risks for companies: “You hire smart people who know how to win,” he says, “and you tell them to win at the wrong thing.” If the incentives are focused on short-term revenue gains, that’s where all the attention goes—and as Jonathan says, “The result of that is that you can lose by winning.”
Instead of focusing on transformative projects that can reshape your industry or revitalize your company, these very smart people focus on what’s known as “feature innovation”: small, somewhat meaningless changes like what color a button should be. The benefits (if any) are small, marginal, and ephemeral.
The problem—and the reason so many companies, and leaders, are averse to taking on substantive projects—is that they simply take longer to ramp up. “It takes typically five or six years for a product or a business to get to scale,” says Jonathan. Even if the benefits would be substantial once the product or service is established, a lot of companies just don’t want to wait that long. “What you’re looking for is profit,” he says, “That happens on the decade scale. That doesn’t happen on the quarterly scale.”
So if you buck the trend and embrace a long-term perspective, and if you’re willing to wait out those early days of getting established, you can enshrine a long-term competitive advantage (and their concomitant profits), because very few of your competitors will even make the attempt.
