Details about Winning Now, Winning Later
Winning Now, Winning Later by David M. Cote – Early in my career, when I worked in various finance and general management positions at General Electric, my colleagues and I were hell-bent on hitting our numbers in the current quarter and year. We’d think about next year, but only when we had to. This obsessive focus on today at the expense of tomorrow didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Our business would perform well for most of a given year, and we’d hire a thousand people to help us grow. Then in October and November, we’d create our plans for the coming year, only to realize we’d never make our numbers unless we laid off a thousand people. So we’d do that, disrupting our business and the lives of all those people. Why, I wondered, hadn’t we thought ahead and only hired, say, two hundred people instead of a thousand? And yet, like most leaders, we didn’t think we had a choice. We were working hard and doing the best we could, and we didn’t see another way.