[cft]

The root cause of the problem is the separation of ownership from control. This lead to the rise of the class of "professional managers", whose interests are intrinsically short-term. In the times when American wealth was created, the owners called the companies with their own names: Boeing, Ford, and MBAs did not exist. Their interests were to pass the earned wealth to their children. The historical mission of the MBAs and the professional managers is to dismantle the salvageable assets and sell them to more vibrant economies.

[yuhong]

Yea, I know, the legacy MBA culture of greed: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-31042419/alum-harvard...

[ShabbyDoo]

Economists call these differences in incentives "agency costs". I learned this term in my MBA program :)

[rprasad]

The separation of ownership from control began with the East India Company, the first known corporate entity. In 1600, the Queen granted a Royal Charter to EIT for pursuing trade with India. Professional managers have existed just as long.

The problem is not the managers, or people with MBAs. The problem is that the Delaware chancery courts, where most American corporations are incorporated, long ago ruled that the duty of the Board of Directors is to manage the company to maximize the returns of its shareholders' investments. They can, and frequently do, get sued if they do not do this.

[mattmcknight]

Yet the timeline upon which they are to do this is unclear. Investors want to maximize for a decade, temporary holders want to maximize the quarter. The point Christensen makes is that short term maximization does not always lead to long term maximization. One thus must blame the shareholders themselves for not acting as investors, but rather as speculators, frequently not even participating in board elections, allowing the CEO to pack the board with allies, just waiting for a bump in the share price so that they can exit their position.

[wallflower]

> temporary holders want to maximize the quarter

Serious question. Did the quarter system come from the agrarian economy? If not, where did the emphasis on three-month increments come from?

[ars]

I don't know, but quarters also match the seasons, and for most of history manufacturing was directly tied to which season it was.

And a lot still is today. Homes, cars, clothing, [specific] food, it's all tired to the season.

[mdda]

In the US, it's probably something to do with quarterly dividends (which makes it the reporting period for financial results). Less frequent dividends would cause the value of shares to drop more significantly post dividend (which happens anyway, but with quarterly distributions, one doesn't have to think of shares as being 'almost there' w.r.t paying out). More frequently (monthly, say) would increase transaction costs too much.

[yuhong]

I think it came from the corporate takeovers that happened back in the 1980s.

[bitops]

Unfortunately, if history is an indicator, the West has not been very good at thinking long term.

In my opinion the race has been run. The damage to our planet is probably irreversible insofar as that at some point human life will not be possible. At that time we can only hope that a more intelligent species will come along and do better than us.

[cft]

East India Company was a British monopoly granted by the Queen (just like the Dutch East India Company was a Dutch monopoly) .

In the Golden and Gilded American Ages, the main shareholder of the wealth-generating American companies was almost always its owner (same person as the chief executive), or his heirs. No MBAs.

[shareme]

BINGO..someone on HN finally gets it..it was not MBAs concentrating on profits but the way ownership changed over the last 40 years to decouple owners from the goals of long term gains.,