I came across a recently published book by Ari Wallach called Longpath, which he describes in the title as “an antidote for Short-Terminism”.
A great summary of the book can be found on the McKinsey Authors Talk website. It’s worthy of a read and for those interested further I’d recommend checking out the book.
A couple of key takeaways for me as I started reading the book.
The first is where he defines Longpath as “a simple but profound mindset that shifts thinking from the short to the long term.” How often do we as leaders (and indeed humans) get caught up in reactionary thinking that means we get caught up in the immediacy of the situation
Indeed, Wallach the goes one step further to posit that we can loose sight of the big picture because of sort term reactionary thinking. Indeed our physiological fight or flight response to short term events or thoughts can cause reactionary responses that completely ignore any long term impact or value.
The situation is always the situation bit its our interpretation and how we react that defines us.
