‘It is very alarming. I would say that roughly half the executives on some of my courses are essentially interested in a six-month time frame or less.  The underlying attitude is "I just want to hit my numbers, whatever the long-term damage. Anyway, I will have been rotated out before the damage becomes visible." It is a complete change from the dominant attitude I've seen in my classroom over the last two decades.’

Jon Byse, chairman of the Strategic Planning Society, mirrors her worries: ‘People used to make careers as strategists.  Now many strategy departments have been axed. They have been replaced by everyone’s having a crack at strategy.  Often people don’t know what they are doing – it is real seat-of-the-pants stuff.'

Anderson at INSEAD adds: ‘What is really disturbing is that I am teaching an upwardly-mobile elite in top companies. If so many of these people think like this, then what is the attitude among the broader range of executives and companies?’

Anderson reckons that she has a unique perspective on what managers really think. ‘These are intensive, closed courses and people know that what they say will never be used against them. So they let their hair down.

There is growing cynicism, a growing feeling that sales and profit targets are arbitrarily being ratcheted upwards, and that they have to meet them somehow.  I don't teach just marketing executives: I see this from people in many different jobs, companies and industries.’

The short-term approach exasperates Anderson. ‘In routes to market you have to take a long-term perspective. Apart from incentives for increased sales, there is very little you can do in less than six months. And such incentives tend to rebound later. I am left asking myself what I can give these short-term thinkers?  They want me to teach them how to defy gravity.’

Our Analysis: This is a worrying trend. As Anderson asks, ‘How can you run a large business on these sorts of time horizons?  The impact will be devastating.’  Often the middle managers that Anderson teaches are reflecting the short-term approach that many senior managers are now adopting.

These people feel that they can have a push to achieve numbers over a quarter or two, and then switch back into long-term strategy mode.  In practice, this is not an option. If senior managers flag short-term goals, then that is what their juniors will chase and what your corporate culture will in time reflect.

These changes also reveal a change in management thinking.  Strategy departments used to produce plans that tried to predict the future.  This has been replaced with the view that the future is not predictable, and that all you can do is to come up with a varied set of contingency plans. Perhaps, these days, many companies feel that even contingency plans are a ‘bridge too far’.