
The longer view and risk management
A well run company is concerned with the long term, and with risk management.
A well run company will consider its supply chains long into the future. A well run company will consider the risk of external shocks and manage itself to provide resilience. A well run company develops staff that will be its future skilled workforce. If a well run company has a bumper year, it will either invest or retain its windfall allowing either growth or resilience. The share price of a well run company should have a boring increase as it grows organically.
If you take a well run company (for example, Boeing "classic") you can squeeze money out of it for many years before things start going wrong. You can lengthen your supply chains, remove margins of error and use increased operating profit to buy back your own shares. But in the process you are hollowing the company out, year after year, and making it weaker. Replicate this across the market and you have today's late-stage capitalism: execs are incentivised on this quarter's profit, or share price, so that's how they manage the company.
And that, my friends, is the story of the 21st century in "the west". If you want long term corporate thinking, you have to look east.