Accounting is the language of business.
Warren BuffettRead
Today, if someone showed me a five-year plan, I'd toss out the pages detailing Years Three, Four and Five as pure fantasy Anyone who thinks he or she can evaluate business conditions five years from now, flunks.
Interpretation
Planning long-term can be unrealistic due to unforeseen changes in business conditions.
Mark McCormack emphasizes the unpredictability of future business conditions, suggesting that rigid long-term planning is often futile. He argues that anyone who believes they can accurately predict the state of their business or the market five years ahead is disregarding the dynamic nature of the environment they've chosen to operate within.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing strategic planning.
Accounting is the language of business.
The game business reinvents itself every five years.
It is very difficult to get people to focus on the most important things when you're in boom times.
I think I've realized that business and being polite [don't] match. You can be fair, but me being polite was not me being fair to myself.
In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.
If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, 'I hate it. I am not going to use this,' that's it for us. We won't get evaluated.
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