described as “the societal disease of our time”—short-term
thinking: “It’s asking what the poll is saying, not what’s great
for the country and what’s best for the future, but what do I
say in the short term to get me from here to there.” And that
national obsession with the short term has come directly from
business. Lear continued, “Joseph Campbell once said that in
medieval times, as you approached the city, your eye was taken
by the cathedral. Today it’s the towers of commerce. It’s busi-
ness, business, business, and in an escalating fashion it has got-
ten more short-term oriented.... You know, they’re not
funding the real iconoclasts today, not funding the innovators,
because that’s risky—that’s long-term investment.”
I think Lear is absolutely right. American business has be-
come the principal shaper and mover in contemporary Amer-
ica—even more so than television—and has, in an odd irony, by
zealously practicing what it preaches, sandbagged itself. Hav-
ing captured the heart and mind of the nation with its siren
songs of instant gratification, it has locked itself into obsolete
practices. Before the flameout of the New Economy and the
equally spectacular fall from grace of the American CEO, cor-
porate leaders had achieved a popularity such as they had never
experienced before in history. But even as we fawned over these
corporate superstars, we failed to ask a crucial question: How
much genuine leadership was being practiced inside even the
most successful companies?
How many of those we believed to be leaders were really
corporate Wizards of Oz, their perceived abilities as illusory as
their cooked books?
Richard Ferry, former president and co-founder of the re-
cruiting firm of Korn/Ferry International, spoke to the problem
of short-term thinking two decades ago and his observations are
Mastering the Context