Strategic Myopia
But nobody looks at five-year trajectories when the quarterly bonus depends on the next thirteen weeks.
One who acts without knowing the method finds ruin. Valluvar links method to outcome. But method requires seeing the full landscape. Your competitor moved six months before you. They saw the market shift. They repositioned. They invested. You were focused on this quarter. This month. This sprint. The quarterly results were good. The annual trend was concerning. The five-year trajectory was alarming. But nobody looks at five-year trajectories when the quarterly bonus depends on the next thirteen weeks.
Sears had the infrastructure to become Amazon before Amazon existed. I found the research staggering. In the 1990s, Sears operated a 125-year-old catalog business, the original direct-to-consumer platform. It owned Prodigy, one of the first commercial internet services. It had credit card data on 60 million households. It controlled the most sophisticated supply chain in American retail. Sears looked at all of this and decided to invest in real estate instead. Strategic myopia isn’t seeing the future poorly. It’s standing on top of the future and failing to look down.
Myopia doesn’t mean blindness. It means wrong focal length. In ophthalmology, myopia occurs when the eye focuses light in front of the retina instead of on it. Close objects are sharp. Distant objects are blurred. The eye works perfectly, just at the wrong distance. Organizational strategic myopia is focal-length failure: the near-term is sharp, quarterly targets, monthly reports, weekly metrics. The long-term is blurred, market shifts, technology disruptions, demographic changes. The organisation sees perfectly. It just can’t see far enough. And the most important objects are always in the distance.
In your next planning session, add one agenda item: ‘What is true today that won’t be true in three years?’ Force the conversation beyond the quarterly horizon. If nobody can answer, the myopia is structural.
That short-sighted focus has a name. Strategic Myopia. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Untie The Knot
Uproot
Myopia was structural: quarterly targets drove resource allocation, bonus structures, and executive attention. The planning horizon was set by the incentive system, not by the competitive landscape.
Navigate
Every quarterly plan includes one investment that serves the 3-year horizon, funded from current resources. The long-term is budgeted, not just discussed.
Tool
CORE / Evolution: the growth framework that forces planning beyond the current quarter. Evolution asks: what is true today that won’t be true in three years?
Implement
Add one agenda item to your next planning session: what is true today that won’t be true in three years? If nobody can answer, the myopia is structural.
Emerge
When the organisation sees beyond the quarter, strategic investments happen early, market shifts are anticipated instead of reacted to, and the competitive position strengthens over time.