Short term-ism and bad choices in organisations

At the moment, I’m prepping for a number of events around (advertising) Effectiveness Week (not least the launch of Les Binet and Peter Field’s next report from the amazing IPA Database c/o the lovely peeps at Thinkbox), exploring what this tells us about advertising effectiveness in a world of TV, VOD, Sponsorship and things like twitter.

One of the themes I anticipate emerging is the effect of short-term horizons for business decision making – what is the impact on the overall effect of your marketing and advertising expenditure of the kind of short-term goals that many businesses seem to be addicted to?

It’s worth remembering that this is an issue across business – not just in the marketing department. I found this piece in the European Business Review (free sign-in) about the need to make companies human shaped and specifically, to do so through experiment and collaboration (because people-shaped solutions are hard-to-anticipate).

“An important problem that prevents most companies to adopt this strategy and foster an architect mindset concerns the fact that experimenting and learning about the beneficial impacts of human nature on organisational design requires short-term losses to achieve long-term gains. Because of the pressure of many companies to satisfy and meet the requirements of their shareholders, this trade-off is hard to achieve. As a result, we see less experimentation…”

Sound familiar?

For more info on the Thinkbox event, please go here