Just like too much salt in the soup

One of the problems with short term aims, the impacts are long term. And it is often the reality that one a short term action has been taken you you can’t go back. We see and hear all the time in companies, we will deal with the negatives of an action later. Right now there is a minor (or not) fire, and we just need to solve that thing now. We know there will be a price later. We tend to be over confident with the later part. And more important, we under estimate the impact and effect of the short term action.

From 1950-1980 IBM was a great gig to have. If you worked for IBM then you worked there for life and received a pension when you retired. The staff of IBM would say they are IBM’ers. But that went away. We can say that IBM has been better than most organization with transitioning from one core product/service to another. They started with business office equipment (type writers and such), to Main Frame computer, to service solutions and cloud. But, IBM lost that we are IBM’er. It became just another Ok place to work.

The point here is if your company is a version of IBM’er, take care to not lose that. There are huge numbers of companies that are good to work at/for. But few will be a place staff identify themselves as an “er” company (has Google was -past tense). When a company starts to look at the short term aim only, they can go from being an “er” company to just another place to work. That does not mean we will not like working at just-another-place-to-work; is is actually very common. It is, being an organization where staff refer to themselves as an “er”, is not too common. The value of that is gold. Worth more than two fiscal quarters of 15% stock price reduction.

Sometimes realities of business forces the choices company leaders have to make. If you are losing money the choices get more limited. If the company is very profitable, just a little less so than last year, and you are an “er” company, maybe the short term choices will be a lot more costly in the long term. Because, once you become the just-another-place-to-work, you are not likely to ever get that back.

It is like putting too much salt in the soup, once too salty, that cannot be fixed.