"Making the Numbers? ""Short Termism"" and the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster"

Abstract

Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on managing the numbers--delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer term performance--makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive advantage. Short termism has been blamed for everything from the decline of the US automobile industry to the low penetration of techniques such as TQM and continuous improvement. Yet a vigorous tradition in the accounting literature establishes that firms routinely sacrifice long-term investment to manage earnings and are rewarded for doing so. This paper presents a model that reconciles these apparently contradictory perspectives. We show that if the source of long-term advantage is modeled as a stock of capability that accumulates over time, the intensity of the firm’s effort to manage short-term earnings at the expense of long-term investment can have very different consequences depending on whether the firm’s capability is close to a ...