Page 148 - Harnessing the Strengths

Dilemma 6: Short Term Versus Long Term ■ 131

(C) Time Horizon

There are signifi cant differences between cultures when it
comes to how far people look forward and backward. Some
cultures need to look years ahead to be able to survive. The
long Swedish time horizon can be attributed to the coun-
try’s long winters. In the short summers, everything for the
rest of the year has to be planned. Also, for centuries, they
have lived off the export of timber, so they know all too

well that it will take another thirty-five years before they
will have a sizable tree to replace the one they just chopped
down. At the other extreme you have the Ethiopians and
Iraqis who are so proud of their heritage that they often look
backward into the past.
Our time horizon also shapes the way we do business.
The long-term horizon of the Japanese can be sharply com-
pared with the “quarterly thinking” of the Americans. This
difference in perspectives was nicely illustrated when Jap-
anese Matsushito tried to buy the operations at Yosemite
National Park in California. The Japanese started with pre-
senting a 250-year business plan. You can just imagine the
reaction of the Californian authorities: “Yikes, this means
1,000 quarterly reports.”
The tension between the short and the long term is also
palpable between functional cultures, such as R&D and
marketing. R&D staff can complain until they are blue in
the face that marketers give them barely enough time to pro-
duce an adequate piece of work. Marketing does not often
allow much time to produce, test, and refi ne a product. In
these situations, most of the profit is lost when workers are

enhancing the product according to the originally expected
specifi cations. Marketers, for their part, complain about the
lack of fl exibility and the reaction time of the researchers.