Corporate Governance Keynote Focuses on Long-Term Thinking

Delivering his keynote address for “New Directions in Corporate Governance" today at the Law School, Lux Capital’s Samuel Arbesman said that companies focusing on the short-term are quite literally being short-sighted, and often are sacrificing their own long-term interests.

Arbesman told attendees at the all-day CLE program that to effectuate change, businesses need to have “big hairy audacious goals,” which involve the courage to “dare to dream big.” In a lively discussion that included a question-and-answer session with the audience, he cited examples of companies engaging in this sort of long-term thinking, including Google, Amazon, and SpaceX. SpaceX’s Elon Musk, for example, started the company with the eventual mission of colonizing Mars, which is certainly a long-term goal, Arbesman noted. 

Arbesman outlined three steps to put long-term thinking into practice:

• Break the goal down into manageable components;
• Recognize that change is multi-generational; and
• Create catalytic institutions.

Arbesman’s advice about the importance of thinking in the long-term extended beyond individual corporations to society in general.

“We need to have these conversations,” he said. “What do we want the future to be? How do we think about that? Too often we don’t. We are so consumed by our short-term thinking that we don’t have these conversations, and when we do, they are often sound-bited into irrelevance.”