For a creature that lives in time we seem to have a very undeveloped sense of how things unfold over time. A classic example of this is how our financial markets so often reward those who slash and burn their way through a company making the numbers look good in the short term – and the short term here can be some years – before reality bites back and the value that has been destroyed in the process is finally revealed.
Steve Jobs’s remarks, “On managing through the economic downturn” makes a refreshing contrast to these hard-nosed fantasists:
“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”