Few predicted the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. However, despite his lack of political credentials, he has demonstrated a talent for understanding what motivates the average American voter. Americans appear to be anxious about their future which, I will argue, may be explained by the short-term thinking that pervades American boardrooms. Firstly, consider paid time off. Most Americans passively accept two weeks off per year and many do not use their full vacation allowance. Although this policy solves employers’ immediate staffing needs, a lack of vacation leads to greater incidences of depression and heart disease. Additionally such miserly vacation policies make travel more difficult. Nineteenth century …show more content…
Such quarterly capitalism has seen CEOs and CFOs offer increasingly higher dividends and stock buybacks. For example, over the past three years The Gap has counter-intuitively increased dividends successive years of declining net income. Every dollar spent on returning cash to shareholders is a dollar that cannot be spent on investing longer-term growth via capex, R&D, eco-initiatives or human capital development. Attracting investors seeking longer-term returns may help avoid the pitfalls of quarterly capitalism. For example, management at Sky plc (Europe’s leading pay TV provider) attributes much of the firm’s success to 21st Century Fox’s large controlling stake which allows the C-suite to play the long …show more content…
Think of the household names that didn’t exist twelve years ago: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb and Whatsapp. The emergence of these firms and the coming third internet wave (pertaining to IoT) has eliminated the need for many of yesterday’s jobs. Moreover, according to the World Economic Forum, 65% of the jobs that today’s primary school children will end up holding do not exist today. In such a time, there is an urgent need to invest in employee education and training. This lack of training is a particularly acute development given prospect of automation. Faced with minimum wage pressure, restaurants are motivated to reduce reliance on human capital. Why pay someone $15 per hour when an iPad can take an order and a robot can make a pizza? Furthermore, complex tasks and functions no longer require human input. Today, robot lawyers are helping people get out of parking tickets and claim airline compensation; investment banks are hiring math PhDs to their trading desks to write complex algorithms and the world is moving towards driverless cars and robot