"In the Long Run We Are All Dead"?
John Maynard Keynes’s famous line can mean a lot of things, but one possible interpretation is that it’s not enough to have a vision for the long-run; you also have to be able to persuade others to adapt it in the short run.
If your vision is so ambitious and so counter-cultural that it leads to your becoming an enemy of the state it won’t do you much good. In short, whether you are a philosopher, mathematician, economist, epidemiologist, scholar etc.—you can’t only be accountable to the truth; you also have to play “politics.”
In business terms, this means you can’t only have a great product that future generations will love; you need something that customers want today (even if or when customers want stupid or destructive things). The corollary of “in the long run we are all dead” is the populist adage, “the customer is always right.”
A Moses who gives the Law but is rejected for it is a failure of rhetoric. An Aaron who makes a golden calf because that’s what the people want is a failure of truth. Both are failures of leadership.
Too much emphasis on truth and you can’t survive to implement it, or worse, the implementation has worse results than if you did nothing. Too much emphasis on rhetoric, on sales and marketing, and you end up a slave to vanity metrics, serving the present moment until you look down and realize you and the all customers you’ve “served” are lemmings that have run off a cliff.
Given these archetypal tradeoffs, where do you position yourself? How much truth will you sacrifice for short-term acceptance? How much political success will you sacrifice to maintain your vision for the long-run?
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