Hopefully this was a very fleeting thought; when it comes to ideas about changing corporate structure you couldn't really come up with a worse one. It is a complete violation of the skin-in-the-game principle that has so successfully propelled capitalist society for more than 200 years.
If management aren't accountable to the wishes of people who have proven they can preserve or grow piles of money, there will be economic waste on a colossal scale compared to what we have now. Corporate management would be overwhelmed by fast talking con men.
Turn your attention instead to the forces that are making short term decisions the better ones. I'm no expert, but if short-term thinking has been going on for a long-term time then something is more fundamentally wrong than "gee, people with money must just be stupid!". People don't seem to like accepting quite how rationally intelligent markets are - the only thing markets have been shown not to do well is make sacrifices for moral reasons.
Even reading this claim in the narrow context of the article it seems too broad. John Cassidy has written an insightful book “How markets fail“ that explains when markets do not generate optimal or desirable outcomes.
Because it is wishful thinking?
Where would the rational intelligence of stock markets be right now without the trillions of dollars in shares bought up directly by central banks and sovereign wealth funds or by corporations using essentially free money provided by central banks?
Last time I checked none of the economic theories about optimal markets included massive state interventions to help markets find the optimal price.
There is short-term thinking encoded into religion on this planet. Short term thinking in the end even extinguishes your beloved capitalism. If there is one thing we need less, its this. And if there is one thing, build to overcome short term thinking its abstract entity's like cooperation's and goverments. The individual is bound to fail here.
So yes, you have a valid point here, but instead of providing a solution, you just regress and suggest we go back to the drawing board and wing it while there?
If i make good (short-term) decisions each quarter, then won't that just add up to be a good decision after 4 quarters? If it turns out that the 'good' decision last quarter turned out to be bad _this_ quarter, then you'd make a change to fix it for _this_ quarter_.
Rather than plan out a 10 year plan, which you can't possibly predict in advance what may happen.
E.g. one (of many) factor in Commodores decline and failure was that they at one point made a "brilliant" move of undercutting the competition in a way that drove massive sales while costing them dis-proportionally little in lost revenues from all of the hardware already in their channel.
Unfortunately it did that by cutting the feet under their dealer network by going mass market retailers and cutting the RRP in public, without giving retailers advance warning, and without giving their dealers rebates on product in their channel that had not yet been sold.
As a result their results looked good for a little while, but they bred so much resentment in their dealer network that it still haunted them years later when they suddenly badly needed that dealer network to push out the Amiga, which was released at a price point where the mass market discount retailers weren't suitable.
It took years for the total cost of that stunt to be visible, and even then it's hard to account for the total impact to the company even now, decades later.
It's not an easy problem.
the psychology behind dividends is not on your side here. dividends are viewed by knowledgeable investors as a company admitting they have run out of good ideas to generate even more profit (aka growth). while dividends can be issued for a host of reasons, the common case is that dividends are issued when reinvestment in the company would generate diminishing returns. typically returns diminish when the company is no longer in a high growth phase, so the company gives the money back to investors to find better returns elsewhere for their risk.
this is why dividends are largely issued by larger, mature companies rather than growing ones. you just won't get most companies to issue dividends because it hurts their growth potential.
you have to change structural incentives to make people care about the long-term. one fundamental reason for this is that many people on wall street want to get rich quick, so there's enormous pressure for companies to be that vehicle, in exchange for which, the companies get rich quick too via their stock price (underlying fundamentals be damned).
why do people care so much to get rich quick? (rhetorical question) i personally don't respect such people, but apparently plenty enough do that my opinion simply doesn't matter as they seem to get the prestige and power they seek. if we all genuinely respected ingenuity, determination, and the ability to make things (not shuffle money around), we wouldn't use income & wealth as a proxy for those things and we wouldn't have perverse incentives that make companies seek short-term pops (high-minded, i know).
I do like dividend paying stock, but is that not a form of short term thinking? “May me my dividend this quarter, I don’t care when happens next year!”
Because they think it is going even higher?
"Fundamentals" are far from the only reason to be long an equity contract.
In common law countries, trusts law means you can distinguish between who has controlling interest and who has beneficial ownership.
So you can own a thing but not own the thing.
If I own something on trust for you, I can control it, but only in your best interests. If you own it on trust for me, I can benefit from the ownership, but without a lot of other legal effects that would normally ride shotgun with a full and undivided ownership.
As usual: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Buying a dividend share that can potentially go up however, is very nice though, such as when purchasing Apple several years ago.
With a shift to long term outcomes, one could do any number of things that are short term bad to line their pockets and claim the benefit is further down the road. The problem isn't really about short or long term goals - does Amazon or Tesla give a rats ass about profit next quarter? No, and IMHO one of those is a solid company while both have high valuations.
In some cases I think the answer is to strip investors of control. They are the ones allegedly pushing short term profits at the expense of the long term. But what is ownership if not a form of control?
Another thought I keep coming back to is dividends. A proper investment gives returns without having to sell your stake. Lets provide incentives for companies to share profit rather than pump stock prices, then everyone can get excited about the right things. This has its downside too in cases where growth may require reinvestment. Perhaps forcing dividend payments for all cash equivalents above some threshold? I dunno, there are a lot of ways to approach this and none of them are good for all companies.