The problem
World-class athletes focus on a goal for years.
But facing growing pressures, can businesses
even hope to think so long-term?
By Russell Pearlman / Illustrations by Tim Ames
But as many senior executives will attest, long-term planning is a luxury they feel they no longer have. In the US, Europe, and other parts of the globe, shareholder campaigns demanding immediate shakeups are on the increase. Today, most large companies spend less than 5 percent of revenue on new research and development; when organizations announce additional spending, the company’s stock price often takes a hit. CEOs have long lamented, albeit anonymously, their inability to withstand short-term pressures. A 2006 study conducted by economists at Duke University found that 78 percent of executives at public companies said that they’d sacrifice long-term economic value for a short-term lift in share price.
Such thinking has a cost. Scholars say forgoing long-term plans for short-term objectives leads to a host of problems: reduced innovation, productivity, and employee satisfaction, and greater susceptibility to defective products and fraud. It’s little surprise that so many CEOs of publicly traded companies are quitting: About 10 percent of them stepped down in 2023. The exodus has continued in the first quarter of 2024, with 622 departures of CEOs from public and private firms—an all-time quarterly record.
CEOs can’t expect to take precisely the same approach as athletes (no investor is going to wait four years for a performance update). But experts say that corporate chiefs can emulate an elite athlete’s approach to long-term planning. Much of it comes down to having a long-term vision and sticking to it. “With athletes and leaders, the key word is ‘focus,’” says Alan Guarino, vice chairman in Korn Ferry’s CEO and Board Services practice. With focus, according to many experts, leaders can take three key steps toward longer-term thinking:
For two years, Marne Martin had a challenging goal: train herself, and her horse, to an elite level and compete in the World Dressage Young Horse Championship. To even have a shot, she had to prepare her Oldenburg mare, Royal Coeur, to artistically execute canters, turns, and pirouettes, without breaking rhythmic stride.
Martin herself had a lot to learn as well. She’d been riding horses since she was a child, but top dressage competitors must master their own set of precise movements and cues to get their horse to perform at an elite level. But it was a task she took on with great perseverance, riding and training with Royal Coeur in the English countryside every day, rain or shine. “You had to show up every day working to be better,” Martin says. “It was a long-term haul.”
If only she could do more of that as a CEO, she thought recently—not train horses, but focus herself and her teams on the long-term. As leader of expense-software firm Emburse, she’s got a bevy of stakeholders looking over her shoulder. The private-equity-owned company had been on a revenue growth streak when she arrived, and she’s been expected to keep that going. She also must block out the constant noise, from some corners of the world, insisting that AI will make expense reports obsolete. But in order for Los Angeles-based Emburse to become a $500 million company—or even bigger—she’ll need time to build out the company’s talent pool, evaluate potential acquisitions, and streamline some processes. “You have to work on what matters in the near term, then preserve time and energy so you can work on the long term,” she says.
This summer, some 10,500 athletes will descend on Paris, seeking to compete against other world elites, set personal bests, and, for the very best, win medals. Getting to the Games takes years of training, practice, and competition—and long-term planning. “What you do four years away from the Olympics is as valuable as what you do right before the Olympics,” says Pete Steinberg, a coach for the US women’s rugby team at the 2016 Summer Games and author of the book Leadership Shock: Using Authenticity to Navigate the Hidden Dangers of Career Success.
Read more on our topics
World-Class Athletes
on the Job
Leadership at the Top
Post
Game-Day
Like top athletes, business leaders know the
value of planning long term, but most feel they
no longer can.
Great business success and innovations
typically come from long-term planning.
Why it matters
Resist most outside pressures, develop sustainable strategies, and know when to peak.
The solution
Number of 2024 athletes in the Games:
10,500
Men
51
%
CEOs vs. top Athletes, by the Numbers
Leaders constantly lament that they can’t will their teams to peak performance. Business books are filled with performance-improvement plans that involve strategic planning, delegating, and continuously measuring whether progress is being made. Those are important, but a big problem, says Martin, the equestrian-turned-CEO, is that some leaders never set what she calls the proper “clock speed” in communicating clear priori-ties to everyone else. Once priorities are set, she says, you can identify the critical steps required to meet those priorities. Then everyone can work to achieve them, whether by hitting a massive goal such as corporate reorganization, or a much smaller one, like delivering a top-notch sales presentation.
Achieving peak performance involves balancing short- and long-term risk: On the one hand, leaders should of course measure the costs and benefits of making and launching new products or embarking on capital-spending projects. On the other, they can’t avoid risk altogether, or future growth will stagnate. After all, athletes don’t improve unless they push themselves—which could, in the short term, cause them to make a bad pass, lose a race, or worse, injure themselves.
Increasingly, experts say that taking breaks is critical to improving performance and peaking at the right time. Korn Ferry’s Guarino says many CEOs are tempted to work seven days a week, and sometimes a critical situation might require that. But that type of regimen is often a recipe for burnout. “Leaders are surviving, not thriving, and they have no time to recover and think,” Steinberg says.
Recovery time doesn’t necessarily mean doing nothing (although it can) or meditating; it can mean deriving meaning from things outside of work. Hazer advises her clients, many of them young women still competing at high athletic levels, to find things to care about beyond the playing field. Athletes that care only about performance can be deflated for days by a failure. The same is true of CEOs. “Balancing your identity allows you to come back and be resilient,” Hazer says.
World-Class Athletes
on the Job
Leadership at the Top
Post
Game-Day
Every
Four Years
Having a long-term goal will help to block out the noise, but without structure, leaders
will fall short. “Nobody gets to the Olympics or CEO by being fly-by-night,” Martin says. Planning a strategy starts with breaking down the long-term vision into many smaller, shorter-term goals. Those goals should be specific, measurable, and achievable. Suddenly, that long-term goal becomes less overwhelming. Meanwhile, every smaller goal helps the leader and their teams to focus and, in many cases, improve their skills.
Multiple studies show that effective business structures increase team productivity, improve decision-making and accountability, and reduce stress. It’s important to note, though, that a structure isn’t a shield against difficult situations: If the last four years have taught leaders anything, it’s that instability and uncertainty are everywhere. Good structures anticipate that those situations will happen, and they allow for both the leader and direct reports to adapt.
Leaders might need to get deep in the weeds on structure, too, in order to reduce obstacles down the road. Developing a defined structure around how teams spend their days might sound like micromanaging, but according to a survey by job-posting site Zippia, 82 percent of people don’t manage their own time well. ”Actually it’s a lot of little things that can make a big difference,” says Steinberg, the former Olympic coach.
Experts say leaders should build structures for themselves as well. “A structure is a plan, and the routine is the sustained ability to stick to that plan,” says leadership coach Hazer. Routines can vary from leader to leader, but most involve setting an intention for each day, batching meetings (to avoid downtime in between), and communicating directly with teams. These routines don’t overlook self-care, either. Getting enough sleep is critical, as is eating well and engaging in some form of exercise. Plus, leaders should leave a few minutes each day to reflect on how they’ve reacted to situations and how they can
keep improving.
Routines can be hard to build—which is why athletes rely on a support group, usually coaches, nutritionists, and family, to help them stay on track. But a Harvard Business Review study found that more than half of CEOs felt lonely, with 61 percent of them saying that this hindered their performance. Steinberg says that coaches, family and, yes, even nutritionists, can help CEOs, too.
Develop Sustainable Strategies
The High Cost of Short-Term Thinking
Know When & How to Peak
athletes
CEOs
about
49
%
Women
Average age:
Oldest ever to compete:
27
72
Bonuses for winning gold medals:
$37,500
US:
Brazil:
$49,000
France:
$87,000
Hungary:
$140,000
Singapore:
$738,000
Average elite-level career lifespan:
14
10
Team sports:
Individual sports:
Average CEO tenure:
Average annual CEO compensation (US):
$16.3
million
Average age (US):
Oldest circa 2024 (US):
58
93
Men
Women
94
%
6
%
Number of CEOs of publicly traded companies worldwide:
55,000
about
View Contents
Nobody gets to
the Games or
CEO by being
fly-by-night”
“
Elite athletes didn’t become elite by accident. They made excellence an all-consuming long-term goal, one for which they endured physical pain, poor performance, criticism from fans, and other distractions, often from a young age. “It’s desire. They want it really, really bad,” says Bill Catlette, author of multiple books on leadership and team building.
Having a long-term goal, experts say, is also the best way for leaders in any field to block out the noise—the pressure from all directions to move fast. From irate activists to grousing social media posters, stakeholders have little interest in a company’s future years from now. This can create a considerable amount of discomfort for corporate leaders—unless they keep their eyes forward. “You need delayed gratification, something that you want that’s even more important than what you have today,” Martin says.
To be sure, elite athletes do have the advantage of knowing immediately if they’ve accomplished their ultimate long-term goal. They make the Olympic team, or they don’t. They set personal-best records, or they don’t. “You can put blinders on and focus on that goal,” says Amanda Hazer, a leadership coach who specializes in helping athletes transition to other roles as their playing careers wind down. But executives aren’t necessarily evaluated in a similar fashion. It can take years to assess a strategic project’s success, and the results aren’t usually as clear-cut as a gold medal.
Still, a strong long-term vision helps leaders through bad news or short-term underperformance. Importantly, says Guarino, it also enables leaders to prioritize the critical decisions they have to make themselves (everything else can be delegated to others). “A lot of noise can be boiled away in that matter,” he says.
It’s critical for leaders not only to block out noise, but also to minimize distractions for their teams. Employees are inundated with so much empty information that they sometimes don’t know what to focus on—or even how to focus, says Joe McCormack, author of Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus. McCormack recommends making single-minded focus a core concept. Allow people to concentrate on one task at a time. Be brief, clear, and concise in communications. Plus, reduce the frequency of emails, town-hall meetings, and other team- or company-wide messages. “While you can and should keep employees informed, don’t force them to consume so much information that they can’t decipher the message,” McCormack says.
Block Out the Noise
$80 billion annually
That figure represents the potential earnings that S&P 500 companies missed out on between 1996 and 2018 because they favored short-term behaviors—such as buying back stock and meeting aggressive quarterly earnings targets—over long-term research and investments, according to a 2020 study from the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute.
Other costs can include:
Fewer new products or product improvements
Innovations are time-consuming:
Apple launched the Macintosh computer in 1984, but spent years designing it.
Forget whether workers get more done at home or in the office: Leaders who constantly change plans wear out their teams.
Companies thinking short term spend less on R&D, opening the door to competitors that do invest in the future.
Lack of job growth, which goes
hand-in-hand with long-term planning,
is a major reason workers quit.
Lower productivity over the long term
Missing out on new opportunities
Higher employee turnover
You have to work on what matters in the near term, then preserve time and energy so you can work on the long term.”
“
44,000
about
years
years
years
7
EVERY 4
YEARS
Olympic athletes focus on a
goal for years. But facing growing
pressures, can businesses even
hope to think so long-term?
By Russell Pearlman / Illustrations by Tim Ames
Read more about Gold Medal Leadership
View Contents
Post Game-Day
Leadership at the Top
World-Class Athletes on the Job
Home
The (Tough) Economics of the Games
Winning It All—After Hours
The Competitive Spirit
Post Game-Day
Winning...with a Work-Life Balance?
Eye for a Star
Know Thyself
Leadership at the Top
Where Are They Now?
Snaring Medals...And Then, Consulting?
The Home Office, with Trophies in the Closet
World-Class Athletes on the Job
Every Four Years: The Challenge
of Staying Long-Term