I call it the short disease: short term investment return thinking; short-sighted views about the relationship between EQ (emotional intelligence) and mindfulness; short-sighted assumptions about employee consciousness and their performance; short attention spans for the link between conscious leadership and overall stock performance–all short-shrifting somebody in the business transaction equation because of it.
The short disease is lazy, but also curable.
It makes me crazy when I see leaders sacrificing quality of human outcomes along their value chain for pure short-term profits when they don’t have to, or building primarily white and male companies and cultures that reflect that when it’s against their own self interest. It makes me crazier still when leaders fundamentally short everyone in their value chain, investors and customers equally by ignoring the fundamental facts for what makes great companies last and what returns the highest profits.
Why not build companies that have great profits and do amazing things for the human race AND be good to the planet and grow great people while maximizing profit?
These are attributes of leadership that can be learned.
70% of the world’s future GDP and investor returns (and then some) require these values and skills to be passed on to the majority of people on the planet in very short order or we’ll be in serious straits: passed on to girls, women, people of color, people living in third world conditions, everyone who gets profit plus good is fundamentally a better goal than profit alone.
So each time we build a tech fund or program that tries to grow a new innovation, or design a school, or create a capital or finance rule and we build it with short disease as the foundation, we screw ourselves out of the future and the present.
This seems self defeating to me. Doesn’t it to you?
tracy saville 