Short-termism is killing our societies and business. It's what I protested years ago in Belgium when we asked politicians to do their jobs instead of trying to gain popular votes with catchphrases and veiled insults.
Short-termism is killing our societies with 4-year maximum visions, where critical things like pensions, health, and education that are in dire need of long-term visions are sacrificed in terms of short-term gains in popularity and votes. Politicians are more concerned about winning a second mandate rather than improving society in the long-term.
For companies, short-termism expresses itself through sprints where you have to bring value in two weeks, where we tend to value vanity metrics or short terms improvements and where every long-term project, or rehaul is hidden behind "technical debt" and never tackled which makes systems more and more fragile. Because those works require a deep and long focus and the gains are visible only in the long run. Instead, we work on projects that are possible to accomplish quickly, selecting the fastest tool available without taking the time to think if it's the best one and if it's solid enough to support the long run. We end up with projects breaking three months after their launch because they relied on fragile dependencies.
Investors are also to blame, for seeking short-term valuations on their investments and looking more at the resell value of a business than at its real possibilities and rentability, focusing again on vanity metrics. We pour money into a failing business, just to be able to sell them quickly and let the repercussions diffuse through society once it's out of our hands.
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