Newsroom
Stay informed with our latest stories, press releases, and other announcements. For media inquiries, contact Ross Parker, Director, Communications.
In the News
7 June 2017 - Sarah Williamson, CEO of not-for-profit initiative Focusing Capital on the Long Term, explains why quarterly guidance should be abolished and how IROs can get insightful feedback from investors.
In the News
2 March 2017 - Schumpeter’s recent column on corporate short-termism suggests that “the solution is to prod incumbent firms to invest vast amounts and insulate their managers from investors” (February 18th). On the contrary, the solutions should be much more targeted to how capital markets really work. We are exploring two such solutions. One is rethinking the quarterly guidance process to engage managers with, rather than insulate them from, investors in their long-term strategic thinking. The second solution is to change the relationships and incentives between asset owners and fund...
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.
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...
In the News
5 October 2016 - An argument is raging on Wall Street. Some institutional investors are hoping to win it. Over the past year, questions have increasingly been raised over whether corporations are losing sight of the future by obsessing over short-term financial performance. Vice President Joe Biden is even getting involved: In a September 27 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, he called this short-term mindset “one of the greatest threats to America’s enduring prosperity.”