Building Your Company For The Next 100 Years — Even As If

An article in Inc. Magazine recently talked about how you should build your company as if you were building it for the next 100 years — while, at the same time, also building it like you would be selling it tomorrow.

It is an interesting and valuable thought experiment: When you force yourself to think about the longterm (and most of us don’t do this nearly enough), you start making decisions differently. You build a strong foundation with a focus on longevity and become much more impervious to short-term fads. It is a technique used by all of the great empire-builders around the world — Larry Page & Sergey Brin build Google with a view for the long term; Mark Zuckerberg thinks about Facebook as something which will be around for decades, if not centuries; Jeff Bezos keeps reminding Amazon shareholders that he is building a company for the long haul and not next quarter.

At the same time it is essential to keep your head in the here and now — thus thinking about having your company ready for an exit tomorrow, will ensure you run your business according to the needs of the here and now.

As Zuck famously wrote: We know what we need to do in the next 3–6 months. We know what our long-term goal, vision and North Star is. Everything in-between we need to figure out.

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. → https://theheretic.org