Building Moonshots – Always Focus on the Long View

Co-authored with Dr. William Cockayne

Bill and I have started a fantastic project that we have discussed for some time: 50+ ways on building moonshots. As part of making headway and inviting your input too, we plan to share early drafts here.

The goal is to produce a book as the seminal, go-to source for visionaries, game changers, and leaders seeking to imagine and achieve the almost impossible. Ultimately, our book will identify and describe 50+ ways for building radical innovative solutions and addressing the world’s grand challenges in order to create a better future. Each way of thinking or way of doing in the book will provide a proven practice for converting big dreams into reality. All the ways will then be further organized by categories to help at any point in the process – how to start, where to wander, when to bet big, how to invest, what to communicate, when to play the long game, and more.

This is one of the ways for building moonshots.

Way #1: Always Focus on the Long View

Making the world a better place requires solutions that aren’t constrained by today, or even tomorrow.

About the Way

The concept of a long view has its roots in military and government planning. A good example is the Marshall Plan, an ambitious US program that gave some $13 billion worth of economic aid to Western European nations in the late 1940s. After the devastation of WWII, world leaders knew rebuilding their nations would take years, yet the US wanted to help accelerate their growth and had a vision to help remake a new world. A similar sentiment was echoed several decades later by US President John F. Kennedy. In his 1961 inaugural address, JFK set the American public’s expectations for taking the long view: “All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days; nor in the life of this Administration; nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.” Or Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first Black President, who used the language of a long walk to freedom to help others understand the extended time it would require for achieving his vision of a country free of apartheid and suffering.

In the 1980s through ‘90s, it became popular to talk about the long view as an art. A major champion was the Global Business Network (GBN), a consultancy set up by a group of entrepreneurs, including Peter Schwartz, that specialized in scenario planning. By 1991, Schwartz encapsulated this thinking in the book The Art of the Long View, which considered the long view as a path for strategic insight. His contemporary Arie de Geus studied corporate longevity, including identifying the key traits of companies that had prospered for 50 years or more.

In recent years, companies such as Amazon, Google, and Lenovo have emphasized the importance of taking the long view as a strategic advantage. For example, in their 2004 IPO filing, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page included a letter to shareholders, describing Google’s foundational value of taking a long-term focus – and they also asked “that our shareholders take the long term view”.

Value of the Way

Taking the long view is a mindset. When it comes to innovation, the mindset we hold influences the decisions and attention we give to future possibility. By focusing on a long view, we are committed to the long term – thinking in years, not project weeks or shareholder quarters – that achieve the bigger outcomes we seek. By thinking in years, one benefit is that we can accept changing the future takes time, so we then put efforts in perspective. Another benefit is that a long view helps us to anchor our vision in the future. We work from what could be instead of using today’s perceptions as blinders.

More than an art or executive stance, the work for building moonshots is a long-term focus that requires converting insight into innovation. Various studies show the economic value of taking the long view. For example, McKinsey Global Institute examined the recent rise of corporate “short-termism” – the opposite of taking a long view – and found that companies with long-term planning horizons exhibit stronger fundamentals, deliver superior financial performance, and add more to economic output and growth than other companies.

Following the Way

Taking the long view rests on three pillars: embracing uncertain outcomes, working with good intentions, and beginning to act today. This approach mixes a long-term view alongside long-term management, long-term organizational structures, and long-term incentives. If you want to bring the long view into your team or company, that means investing – both in projects and people – in the long-term. It also means embedding the value of long-term thinking into your group’s values. Consider the long-lasting and seminal The Toyota Way, a manifesto that lists 14 corporate principles; principle 1 is to “Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.”

At a personal level, spend some time visualizing and thinking about your future at least weekly. For many, what is scheduled gets done, so block some free time to cultivate your long-term thinking and purposefully spend time wandering into the future that you want. As the saying goes, we become what we think about.

Living the Way

Example team discussion prompts:

• Are we making a short-term or long-term decision in this project?
• What long-term payoff can we expect from this action?
• Will our future selves thank us or criticize us for this decision?

Example in Action

Jeff Bezos started Amazon in the mid-1990s with a strong focus on long-term thinking. In Amazon’s 1997 annual report, Bezos stated that “It’s All About the Long Term” and explained that this outlook meant their management team might make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than other companies. Amazon has codified this view in its leadership principles, emphasizing that its leaders “think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.”

Every year as CEO, Bezos republished his original 1997 letter to shareholders, underscoring Amazon’s unwavering commitment to always focusing on the long view. As he told Wired magazine in 2011: “If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you're willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you're now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow – and we’re very stubborn.”

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What’s Next?

This post is just a start, and we welcome your thoughts on our book premise, taking the long view, and moonshots in general. Stay tuned for the next topic!