What is Long-term?
by Miki Saxon
I read two articles yesterday. They both focus on how the long-term thinking of Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff inform their decision making and are well worth your reading.
Bezos is famous for ignoring Wall Street for Amazon’s first two decades.
When it comes to making the most important and the most long-term decisions, Bezos has a simple rule that’s quite useful: “Focus [your vision] on the things that won’t change.”
At Amazon, this means that everything is built around their value of customer obsession.
Benioff has a different approach to making decisions, but still based on the long-term vision he embedded in Salesforce’s culture from the day of founding.
I came back with a clear vision of what the future of the internet was going to be in regards to software-as-a-service and cloud computing. I also had a much deeper sense of my spiritual self. So I said, “When I start a company, I will integrate culture with service.”
When I started Salesforce, on March 8, 1999, I said we’re going to put one percent of our equity, product and time into a foundation and create a culture of service within our company. We’ll be creating new technology, the cloud; we’ll be creating a new business model, subscription services; and we’ll create a culture built on philanthropy.
Last month Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon and a legion of executives came out publicly against Wall Street’s short-term focus.
The emphasis on quarterly earnings, and the importance of beating estimates, is warping American business and the economy, argue almost 200 CEOs who belong to the Business Roundtable, a lobbying organization. Short-term thinking leads corporations to choke back on hiring, and to starve research and development of the spending the fuels long-term growth. The pressure of quarterly earnings is one reason fewer companies are interested in going pubic, preferring the slower growth that comes with being private than the scrutiny that comes with being listed.
Wall Street’s short-term thinking never got a toe-hold at either Salesforce or Amazon, but the reasons it didn’t created significantly different cultures.
While Benioff’s obsession culminates in giving back, Bezos’ obsession comes at a substantial cost to Amazon warehouse workers, the environment and even society.
Image credit: Scott Ellis
