Short-term thinking can be risky business

Escape the short-term thinking mindsetWhile making the wrong long-term plan could drive someone right into a proverbial brick wall, the dangerous habit of overly relying on short-term thinking to decide anything and everything can turn into equally catastrophic failures.

At the very least, resorting to short-term thinking for business management can be quite stressful as the lack of solid longer-term thinking sets the stage for a stressful work environment where everything seems to hang in the latest decision needing to be made.

For instance, look at how many business decisions are being made just to pump up the current quarter’s results. Worse yet, consider the legions of C-level executives who bend over backwards to tie in short sighted money deals with ever more capricious investors. The short-term thinking pitfalls are obvious, in today’s business environment, hence the importance of learning to recognize it in order to properly manage it.

Short-term management has upsides which, among other things, helps the company move swiftly when market changes occur but the downsides are way more risky as they could bring down the whole organization into a sort of vortex made strong by countless small mistakes adding up into a much larger “situation” that ends up spinning out of all control (and endangering everybody’s job).

Short-term thinking paves the way to exciting business management times as everything is up for discussion on a regular basis but that’s the kind of mindset that people who like to plan far ahead feel uncomfortable with.

The holy grail isn’t just short-term or just long-term, it’s about balance — a sort of comfort zone for decision making where the latest “trends” don’t necessarily wildly skew everything that was already planned ahead.

If anything, perhaps this article will help you realize how foolish it can be to jump head first in the latest media spin only to find out, a little later, that the spin had more to do with hot air than anything else.

So take your time. Think. Decide better and elevate yourself over the often risky pool of trends and media spins that , unchecked, can scrap a well laid out plan in favor of an impulsive and frenzied scramble for sudden (and usually largely irrelevant -or- unnecessary) reorganization.

Life is much better for those who manage to escape the short-term thinking roller coaster.

Tags: short-term, long-term, management, business, decisions, media spin

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