Deadly Disease 2: Emphasis on Short-Term Profits
How do managers make profits these days? Today's managers are plagued by "paper entrepreneurialism. Heavy pressure comes from the stock market for short-term, quarter-by-quarter gains. These gains ignore variation and each quarter they must go up. So managers rely on creative accounting, mergers, acquisitions, tax schemes, foreign currency swaps and all sorts of finagling to boost the short-term profit. This disease when unchecked will ruin our economy.