just as relevant today: “Corporate America may talk, on an in-
tellectual level, about what it’ll take to succeed in the twenty-
first century, but when it gets right down to decision making, all
that matters is the next quarterly earnings report. That’s what’s
driving much of the system. With that mind-set, everything else
becomes secondary to the ability to deliver the next quarterly
earnings push-up. We’re on a treadmill. The reward system in
this country is geared to the short term.”
Our addiction to the short term gave us freeze-frame shots
of a changing world, preventing us from seeing that it was
shrinking, heating up, growing rancorous and ambitious—not
just politically, but socially and economically. Just as our fore-
bears challenged British rule, China, Japan, and Korea, virtu-
ally all of Europe, Scandinavia, and Australia have challenged
American corporate rule—even as the Arab nations began to
take back their oil. These upstarts are beating us at our own
game, manufacturing and marketing. Japan, above all, saw that
the marketplace was the real battlefield and that trade was not
only the ultimate weapon, but the source of true national secu-
rity. The Soviet Union’s recognition that trade trumps ideol-
ogy led to its inevitable dismantling and accounts for the eager
self-interest with which the Czech Republic and other former
Soviet countries sought inclusion in the European Union.
Perhaps because they’re centuries older than we are, and
therefore more sophisticated and wiser, our friends in Asia and
Europe know that political regimes come and go, and ideolo-
gies wax and wane, but—human nature being what it is—our
basic needs are economic, not political.
Some in America are still addicted to the quick fix and the
fast buck. They haven’t yet realized that the new bottom line is
that there is no bottom line—there aren’t any lines, much less
On Becoming a Leader