Long Time Perspective as a Predictor of Business Success

On a gray afternoon in 1968, a political science professor studying urban growth walked across the Harvard campus with a problem he couldn’t shake.

Edward Banfield had spent years studying why some people rise to the top while others stay stuck.

Surrounded by the brightest minds, in one of the most prestigious institutions on the planet, he expected the answer to be something obvious: raw intelligence, elite education, family wealth, powerful connections.

Those were the bets everyone in that era would have made…the same ones most founders quietly still believe today.

But as Banfield sifted through the data, stories, and decades of life histories…the pattern refused to cooperate.

It turned out that a vast number of people with pedigrees went nowhere. And, many who broke through had none.. The traditional explanations kept breaking on the rocks of reality.

The more he looked, the more one big uncomfortable truth emerged: the real dividing line wasn’t IQ, capital, or credentials at all…

It was how far into the future a person routinely thought when making decisions.

Interesting…this ties into another trait that very successful business owners share and that is the use of imagination…but we’ll talk about that in a future newsletter..

That lens…your time horizon…quietly determines almost every strategic choice you make as a founder.

It’s important to understand this in more detail… But first…

Why This Matters Now

Markets are noisier than ever.

In that chaos, founders who can’t see past the next 3-6 months get yanked around by every short-term pressure: cash-flow swings, a single big client, this quarter’s ad CAC.

Meanwhile, a tiny minority is playing a completely different game.

Banfield called this mindset “long-time perspective.” In his study of social and economic mobility, he concluded that:

“The longer the period of time a person takes into consideration when making a decision, the more successful that person will be.”— Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited, summarized by American Management Association Source: American Management Association, "The Value of a Long-Term Perspective"

Modern research backs him up. Psychologists call this Future Time Perspective (FTP)—“the present anticipation of future goals and events.” People with a strong future time perspective plan more, invest more, and are more willing to sacrifice now for later gains.

Interestingly, at the company level, McKinsey found that public firms with a longer-term orientation outperformed short-term peers by 47% higher revenue growth and 36% higher earnings growth, and created far more jobs over a 15-year window.

In other words: your time horizon is not a joke…it’s a guidance system.

The Time Horizon Ladder: From Tasks to Trillions

Let’s map how time perspective typically changes as you move up the value ladder from employee to small business owner to founder of a billion-dollar company.

1) Transactional Employee: Today → This Week

Most employees in transactional roles live on a day–week–sometimes month cycle:

• "What’s due today?"

• "What does my boss need by Friday?"

• "Am I going to hit this month’s KPI (due in 5 days)?"

Their rewards are short-term: salary, bonuses, performance reviews.

Research on future time perspective shows that individuals with a limited FTP are less likely to engage in actions that require long-term effort—like deep skill-building or major career moves.

Nothing wrong with this. But when a business owner or “leader” operates on this horizon, the business stays permanently stuck in firefighting mode.

2) Small Business Owner: This Week → Quarter → 1–2 Years

Most small business owners extend the horizon a bit:

• "Can we make payroll this month?"

• "What’s our plan for growth this quarter?"

• "How do we survive the economic cycle we’re in (this year)?"

They do think about next year’s revenue and next season’s pipeline. But the gravitational pull is still often shorter term (cash flow, survival, etc).

Entrepreneurship research finds that people with stronger future time perspective are more likely to even form the intention to start a venture in the first place. So getting to this stage already required you to look further out than the average employee.

But many founders never extend beyond a 1–2 year view. They stay trapped in:

• Client delivery risk

• Ad-channel dependency

• Hiring reactively, not architecturally

3) Billion-Dollar Founder: 10–20+ Years

At the top of the ladder, the time horizon stretches to decades.

Founders who build category-defining companies almost always:

• Hold a 10–20+ year thesis about how their market will evolve.

• Make decisions that look irrational if you only care about the next 12 months.

• Are willing to endure years of low profits or volatility to build an enduring company vision.

Corporate strategy research consistently finds that companies with a long-term orientation invest more in R&D, talent, and intangible assets and outperform short-term peers on growth and earnings over time.

Let’s look at a concrete example.

Case Study: Bezos and the 10+ Year Bet

In 1997, Amazon was a young, unprofitable online bookstore.

In his original letter to shareholders that year, Jeff Bezos wrote something most founders say but few are willing to live by:

“We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. We will make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.”— Jeff Bezos, 1997 Letter to ShareholdersSource: Amazon, "1997 Letter to Shareholders"

He then backed it up with behavior:

• Years of minimal profit while aggressively expanding into new categories and geographies.

• Heavy early investment in Amazon Web Services (AWS)…a move that looked strange for an e-commerce company at the time.

• Billions poured into logistics infrastructure (fulfillment centers, robotics, last‑mile delivery) with payoffs stretching 10–20 years out.

Those decisions looked questionable if you only cared about the next quarter.

Over a decade-plus, they turned Amazon into:

• The default infrastructure for online retail.

• One of the world’s dominant cloud platforms.

• A company that could out‑execute competitors because its systems, culture, and capital base were built for the long game.

Bezos’s core advantage was not just capital or intelligence. It was his willingness to actually operate on a 10–20 year horizon while everyone else optimized for the next quarter.

That’s Banfield’s “long-time perspective” in perfect use.

How to Train Your Founder Time Horizon

You might be thinking: "Okay, great. But I still have to make payroll next month. How do I actually do this without getting crushed by reality?"

This is where psychology and systems come together.

Below are some strategies backed by research and our own experience that we use and teach.

1) Make Your Future Self Come Alive Today

Hal Hershfield and colleagues showed that people treat their future selves like strangers. When your future self feels distant and abstract, you’re less willing to sacrifice for them.

“When people are helped to see their future selves as more similar and vivid, they are more willing to make choices today that may benefit them at some point in the years to come.”— Hal Hershfield, research on self-continuity and optimizing behavior

How to apply Future Aliveness this week:

Write a letter from your future self to your present self.

2) Pre-Commit to the Future

Goal-setting research (Locke & Latham and others) shows that goal commitment or your willingness to stick with a goal over time…drives performance.

For founders, that means baking your long-term vision into your living, breathing company, not just on a once a year slide.

How to apply a Pre-Commit this week:

• Add 2–3 long-horizon KPIs to your dashboard:

Now you’re forcing today’s decisions to answer to tomorrow’s priorities.

3) Run Meetings on Three Time Horizons

Founders get dragged into short-term chaos because they never explicitly allocate time to longer term horizons.

How to Apply Long Term Horizon Thiking (ongoing):

Re-architect your weekly leadership meeting into three blocks:

1. 30–40 minutes — Fires & Focus This Week

2. 10–20 minutes — 12–24 Month Roadmap

3. 5-10 minutes — 10-Year Questions

The point isn’t to perfectly predict the future. It’s to normalize thinking in decade-terms while you still execute this week.

4) Use Stoic Perspective to Shrink Short-Term Drama

Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca constantly zoomed out:

• Memento mori (remember you will die) eliminates trivial concerns.

• The “view from above” exercise imagines your life, your company, your city from high above (and across time).

For founders, this has a practical edge:

• A bad quarter stops feeling like the end of the world.

• You make cleaner decisions about people, markets, and products because you’re not hostage to this week’s emotions.

When feeling squeezed…

Ask: Will this matter in 5 years? If not, treat it as a tactical problem, not a company identity crisis.

You don’t have to think in decades 24/7. You just need to make sure that the part of you that does gets real play time on the field.

Final Thoughts

Banfield’s conclusion from decades ago still hits:

The people who rise the furthest are the ones who take the longest period of time into account when they decide what to do today.

The same is true for companies.

Most founders try to win the next 12–18 months. A few are quietly building for 2035.

Those few design different offers. Hire different people. Make different sacrifices. And when the dust settles, they’re the ones everyone calls "lucky."

This is Issue 29 of Modern Operators. We help founder-led businesses scale smarter through systems that enable your team to align, execute and optimize for predictable and sustainable growth.

If you want help architecting a long-term operating system—one that balances this quarter’s cash with the next decade’s moat—hit reply and tell me your #1 operations headache right now.