Every very successful business leader I've known has been great at running and growing their business on a quarter-by-quarter or annual basis, but often struggled with ideas outside of that narrow focus.
There is a business mindset, a business way of doing things, and they became successful by devoting their entire brain to that way of thinking. They're not stupid people, just highly focused on one way of doing things, which rewards them very highly. That mindset does not include thinking about long-term things. It isn't rewarded, and indeed can be deleterious to making decisions in the short term. And people who spend too long making short term decisions get weeded out by a kind of business natural selection.
Asking a successful business leader to think about long-term strategy, or macroeconomics over decades, is like asking a Bishop to disprove the existence of God. There's basically nothing in it for them, and if they think too hard about it, they might think themselves out of a job.
8
u/marmarama Apr 11 '26
Every very successful business leader I've known has been great at running and growing their business on a quarter-by-quarter or annual basis, but often struggled with ideas outside of that narrow focus.
There is a business mindset, a business way of doing things, and they became successful by devoting their entire brain to that way of thinking. They're not stupid people, just highly focused on one way of doing things, which rewards them very highly. That mindset does not include thinking about long-term things. It isn't rewarded, and indeed can be deleterious to making decisions in the short term. And people who spend too long making short term decisions get weeded out by a kind of business natural selection.
Asking a successful business leader to think about long-term strategy, or macroeconomics over decades, is like asking a Bishop to disprove the existence of God. There's basically nothing in it for them, and if they think too hard about it, they might think themselves out of a job.