Resources
We conduct original research on the causes of short-term business decisions and work to find practical solutions.
In the News
16 February 2017 - AS AMERICA’S economy has misfired over the past decade, several grand theories have emerged about what went wrong. Economists fret about secular stagnation, debt hangovers and whether demography explains sluggish growth. In American boardrooms, meanwhile, a widely held view is that a dangerous short-termism has taken hold. This theory contends that investors and executives have become myopic, leading firms to invest too little. Like many business ideas, short-termism fits the experience of some individual business people. But as a theory about how the economy works...
In the News
16 February 2017 - If they do, as many CEOs believe, this is a serious indictment of current corporate governance arrangements and has important policy implications. To take one close to my heart, if short-termism causes underinvestment, it will be a cause of secular stagnation. I am not sure what to believe in this area. On the one hand, there are many anecdotes suggesting that pressures to manage earnings hold back investment. And the short-termism view is very widely believed.
Report
8 February 2017 - Corporate short-termism has been the subject of ongoing debate among leaders in business, government, and academia for decades, but hard evidence on the impact of short-termism on company performance and economic growth has remained scarce. To fill this gap, MGI created a systematic measurement of long- and short-termism at the company level. Its findings show that companies classified as “long term” outperform their shorter-term peers on a range of key economic and financial metrics. Based on an analysis of 615 large and mid-cap U.S. publicly listed companies...
In the News
8 February 2017 - Does pressure to deliver short-term earnings undermine the long-term performance of U.S. companies? That’s been a hotly-debated issue in corporate America for a long time. (I remember the day in the 1980s when the late Senator Paul Tsongas visited The Wall Street Journal to inform us he was going to run for president and make eliminating quarterly earnings a key plank in his campaign!) But the debate has gotten hotter in the last decade, with surveys of CEOs suggesting pressure to deliver short-term results is on...
In the News
8 February 2017 - On the day of the first-ever board meeting of FCLT Global, chair Mark Wiseman made the nonprofit’s position clear: “Each and every day that a short-term decision is made, we are destroying value.” Four months later, the group has the data to back Wiseman up. On average, U.S. companies with a long-term focus reported 47 percent higher revenue than other large and midsize businesses from 2001 to 2014, according to a study by McKinsey & Co. expected to be released today. They also showed less volatility...
In the News
7 February 2017 - This has long seemed intuitively true to us. We’ve seen companies such as Unilever, AT&T, and Amazon succeed by sticking resolutely to a long-term view. And yet we have not had the comprehensive data needed to quantify the payoff from managing for the long term — until now. New research, led by a team from McKinsey Global Institute in cooperation with FCLT Global, found that companies that operate with a true long-term mindset have consistently outperformed their industry peers since 2001 across almost every financial measure...
Article
1 February 2017 - We are pleased to announce that Randall Stephenson, Chairman and CEO of AT&T, has been appointed to the FCLTGlobal Board of Directors, and Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, and Nitin Nohria, Ph.D and Dean of Harvard Business School, will serve as Strategic Advisors. Stephenson, who has been at the helm of AT&T since 2007, was previously the senior executive vice president and CFO of Southwestern Bell Telephone from 2001-2004, and the company’s COO. He is a member of the board of directors of Emerson Electric Co....
Article
14 December 2016 - Jonathan Bailey, Director of Research at FCLT Global, speaks to Carsten Stendevad about what it takes to build a long-term oriented investment organization. Carsten Stendevad is CEO of ATP, one of Europe’s largest pension plans with 5 million members and $120bn in assets. Under his leadership since April 2013, ATP has fundamentally redesigned its investment strategy and expanded its direct investment capability, delivering strong investment returns. ATP has also tripled the size of its benefit processing business, while substantially reducing operating costs. Carsten announced that he will step down...