Franz M. Schmid-Preissler

„Where are the ten-year strategies“, ask the authors of a recently published survey about the life expectancy of companies in light of the conclusion that strategies are assessed more and more often in regard to their short-term effectiveness. With the effect that managers lapse into a short-term thinking and turn strategies into survival strategies.

This discussion should not lead to a lasting irritation about the value of long-term strategies because these still bear a meaning and they will continue to do so.

Surely, continuously changing scenarios and changes forced upon companies from the outside do not make it easy to settle on a long-term strategy and stick to it. However, especially the constant need to adapt proves the necessity for long-term planning, should short notice reactions not lead to a zig-zag path. Without a reliable guide adjustment or alteration are missing the reference. Of course, all persons involved, especially consultants, have to be more demanding of themselves when it comes to the development of long-term strategies. And they have to adapt to a much higher frequency of changes – they have to clearly predict the need for adaption sooner and give it an outline. Beautiful slides and computer graphics are not in itself sufficient. And a predilection for detail can easily degenerate into never ending stories. Long-term strategies require experience and development, vision and caution, basic values and present-orientedness – only with the right connection of the opposites the right impulse occurs, something a concept has to communicate.

Strategies have to stand up to adjustments. Properly composed long-term strategies are the compass for determining the direction a company wants to take. Long-term strategies do not lose their value because they are occasionally exposed to quarterly reports and the duration of budgets or management contracts. However, long-term strategies should not be bent to pure hope, which is used to promise for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, what can’t already be kept for today.

Long-term strategies as I understand them are based on values that are deployed bundled and controlled, whereas the factor time has to be in proportion with feasibility, development and maturation periods. In every long-term strategy there are of course appropriate ranges of flexibility and course corrections. Long-term strategies unite the past, present and future into one whole.

I want to give another hint in regard to long-term strategies: Strategies are living objects, that should not be signed and locked up like is often wrongly claimed about contracts, but should be around us, like living creatures.

Is a company missing a long-term strategy, then it is also missing the equipment for survival in stormy times and the end could be as close as that of the mountain hiker who relies on the current sunshine without bringing along equipment.

Long-term strategies are able to bond the best employees to a company. They are a potential for trust, especially in difficult times. And long-term strategies offer orientation.