Long

There’s a great podcast called Acquired, where the hosts do super long-form episodes on the history of great companies. Think IKEA, Rolex, Mars (three of the more recent companies they’ve profiled).

If you plan to listen, set aside a bunch of time. Each is at least three hours long. And that’s part of the point. These episodes need to take time, because the founding stories (and accompanying histories of them) feature founders and CEOs who think on incredibly long time horizons.

I’ve been reminded of their time horizons recently, because a lot of what’s being discussed in this space is very short term. How do you survive the next shipment arriving when the tariff bill is due? How do you fund the next order with your manufacturer when your cash levels are reduced because you paid that tariff bill?

Long time horizons and short-term urgencies feel, on their face, to be at odds with each other. But I don’t think they are.

Every great company—every iconic brand—has had to survive near-death experiences. But having an incredibly long-term lens will change how you choose to survive them.

Walt Disney, for instance, leveraged himself personally with financing (Snow White was so over budget, he had to mortgage his house and take out a $250K loan to finance finishing production.) But Disney also played a long-term game: he was willing to take radical approaches to solve a short-term urgency, because he believed that animated cartoons paid off in their revivals (“every seven years, they come back for a new audience”) and their IP.

And Rolex, when quartz technology was introduced to watches, didn’t panic like the rest of the market. They never introduced a quartz watch, never drastically dropped their prices, and were OK with the fact that they might not sell as many watches. They believed the types of watches they wanted to make should exist, and they stuck to making them. Even if that meant selling less of them.

A lot of decisions that end up getting made during short-term urgencies are related to capturing as much value as possible, as quickly as possible. And that makes sense. You need cash to survive.

But I think the lesson here (and the vision I try to operate with) is that, when you’re faced with those short-term urgencies, you’re better off thinking more about value creation than value capture. You’re better off staying true to your vision, and operating against it, because if you’re right about your vision, all you really need to do is survive in those situations, not thrive. You’ll do that later and to a much higher degree.