The business world has spent decades worshipping at the altar of patience. ‘Think long-term’, consultants intoned. ‘Play the long game’, board members counselled. Warren Buffett became a secular saint precisely because he sat still whilst others panicked. But the very cycles that strategic patience was meant to outlast have compressed into each other with such ferocity that waiting has become the riskiest strategy of all.
The median tenure of S&P 500 chief executives fell 20 per cent between 2013 and 2022, from six years to 4.8 years. By mid-2025, CEO turnover hit record levels—1,504 departures through August, the highest figure since tracking began in 2002. Private equity holding periods, meanwhile, have doubled from roughly three years to six, with some markets now averaging 7.1 years. Capital that was meant to move quickly has slowed to a crawl. Leadership that was meant to provide stability now churns like butter.
The collision matters because these cycles were once neatly separated. Political mandates ran four to five years. Capital deployment followed three-to-five-year horizons. Technology product cycles stretched across multiple years, giving companies breathing room to respond. That separation created natural cadences. A CEO could reasonably plan a three-year transformation knowing her capital partners would stay put and her technology wouldn’t be leapfrogged mid-execution.
A temporal mismatch
That world has vanished. Technology cycles have compressed to 18 months or less for nearly half of manufacturers. Consumer products now turn over every two years. AI-driven development has collapsed the time between iterations from years to months. Private equity firms, however, having paid peak prices in 2021, now sit on companies for seven years trying to justify those valuations. Limited partners, their capital locked up far longer than planned, have less to deploy in new funds. The system has jammed.
The temporal mismatch is alarming. Boards structured for patience—quarterly reviews, annual strategy sessions, three-year performance targets—are governing companies that must reinvent themselves every 18 months merely to survive. The very governance mechanisms designed to prevent short-termism have become anchors dragging companies under.
Things get stranger still when we look at what passes for ‘long-term’ thinking in 2025. A CEO announcing a ‘ten-year transformation’ is statistically unlikely to survive even five years in post. A private equity firm promising patient capital whilst holding companies for seven years isn’t patient—it’s paralysed. The language of long-termism has become a cover for an inability to execute at the speed reality demands.
Assumptions that no longer hold
The received wisdom about patience rests on assumptions that no longer hold. The classic argument—that short-termism destroys value—assumed that genuine strategic moves required time to mature. Plant that factory, build that brand, develop that technology; good things come to those who wait. But when technology cycles compress to 18 months, the factory becomes obsolete before completion. When CEO tenure averages under five years, brand-building becomes someone else’s problem. Patience hasn’t been rewarded; it’s been punished.
The companies thriving aren’t the patient ones. They’re the ones that have reframed reinvention as tempo management rather than transformation. They recognise that speed is not the enemy of strategy—misalignment of operating tempo with market tempo is. When semiconductor manufacturers turned to modular production systems that allow for rapid reconfiguration, they weren’t abandoning long-term thinking. They were embedding adaptability into the structure itself, making patience irrelevant.
Boards face stark implications. The traditional model—independent directors providing patient oversight, insulating management from quarterly pressures, thinking in three-to-five-year horizons—has become structurally misaligned with reality. A board optimised for patience is optimised for exactly the wrong thing. It’s like building a ship designed for calm seas when you’re sailing through a hurricane.
This is not an argument for reckless short-termism or quarterly earnings obsession. It’s recognition that the temporal architecture of business has fundamentally shifted. When capital cycles, political cycles, and technology cycles move at radically different speeds whilst being more interdependent than ever, the notion of a single “long-term” strategy becomes incoherent. There is no stable horizon to aim for because the horizons themselves are in motion.
Knowing the difference
Reinvention, then, is not about having better vision or stronger resolve. It’s about building organisations that can operate at multiple tempos simultaneously—patient where patience still works, rapid where speed matters, and clever enough to know the difference. That requires governance structures designed for perpetual recalibration rather than periodic review.
Most organisations remain governed as if 2015 never ended. They operate on assumptions about cycle synchronisation that were questionable a decade ago and are demonstrably false today. The advice to ‘think long-term’ hasn’t just become unhelpful—it’s become dangerous. When the ground is moving beneath your feet, standing still is not stability. It’s suicide.
The winners in the next decade won’t be those who think furthest ahead. They’ll be those who move fastest at making the right bets, knowing full well they’ll need to make different bets next quarter. Impatience, properly channelled, is no vice. In a world of compressed cycles, it’s the only way to survive.
Photo: Dreamstime.
