Lengthening horizons

It often seems to me that my job is first and foremost to help people lengthen their horizons and then try to guide and coach them so their behavior aligns with that longer view. Which is complicated by the little bumps in the road that continually poke up. A wire that hasn't arrived on time. A marriage that's falling apart. Cancer. And so on.

Ideally all of these eventualities are anticipated and planned for, but in practice some of them just crop up. The worse people are at planning -- i.e. the more poorly I do this part of my job or the later I catch them in the arc of their lives -- the more of these things arise.

It's always instructive to look at people and organizations that have done better jobs at things. Amazon, for one. However much I resist the full Amazonization of our lives, one cannot but marvel at what Bezos and team have done over coming up on a quarter century. Like Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, it turns out that Bezos has been publishing an annual letter since 1997, and somewhere on the interweb I came across one big pdf of them and printed it out. I've been trying to read one a morning on business days. In keeping with Bezos's philosophy of distillation (he is said to try to make one or two good decisions a day), they are very brief -- about two pages max per year.

In 2009 he focused on a lot of operational metrics -- number of products on platform, number of new reviews, new product lines launched on Amazon Web Services... Then he talks about Amazon's goal-setting practice, which takes months, and the goals are constantly revisited throughout the year, some of them measured, others jettisoned. He is at pains to point out that very few of their discussions or metrics are financial in nature, it's all about serving the customer better.

Like Buffett, even in - or perhaps particularly in -- years of financial crisis (2008, 2009, 2020) -- the crisis and its impact on the business isn't even mentioned. There is no excuse-making, no caveating of what went wrong and blaming it on external factors -- there is only the future.