In the contemporary ideology of business it doesn't mater if you burn next years seed because business decisions are based not on strategic thinking but making sure analysts who Lewinskied their way in life say something nice about you on CNBC and compensation schemes that encourages pawning the Royal Doulton.
I spent much of the last decade watching MBA's fire engineers who could neither describe their positions let alone evaluate their performance. They were driven only by the promise of a $50,000 bonus for every $1,000,000 dollars in salaries they cut. Want to guess how that company is doing today?
I mean yeah, we had some great profits from the sheer inertia behind several mature product lines but throwing out the product roadmap and licensing hardware from a Taiwanese ODM and outsourcing porting and further development to India never produced a shippable product. Their only remaining business is patent trolling and leasing empty office buildings (which is nowhere near as lucrative as it once was).
Entertaining post. I agree with you - it’s all about next quarters earnings and what is spewed by the “analysts” - hired whores in a lot of cases. Long term strategy is not what happens - it’s all about scrambling and passing the buck. I’ve seen it and it’s not pretty.
I have also witnessed some incredibly stupid corporate decisions based on WRONG statistics, etc., which led to people getting fired for no reason. People were fired who were essential to long term growth and immediate revenue stream. Let’s just say some top people are now paying the price for that little snafu, but only because they have endangered their boss and the company has to look like “it’s doing something to fix the problem”.