It's equally un-credible to pretend the people who were making decisions 30 years ago are the same people making decisions today. Or to pretend that the type of thinking required to grow a restaurant into a juggernaut is the same type of thinking that maintains the juggernaut. Or that a corporation beholden to the desires of shareholders won't change behavior as the desires of those shareholders change.

Why would the shareholders want short term thinking? Stock valuations are based on future expected profits.

Short term thinking leads to a crashing stock value, followed by bankruptcy.

Investors don't want that.

...are you really arguing corporations aren't driven by quarterly and annual results?

If I do something today, and the corporation benefits in 10 years, I don't get the credit for that. Whoever has my role in 10 years gets the credit.

I completely agree that corporations SHOULD think long-term. But I fail to see much evidence of that.

If you want to argue that Ray Kroc had a long-term vision, you'd probably be right. But I very much doubt today's management thinks that far out.

> But I fail to see much evidence of that.

Every large company on the stock exchange is evidence of that.

> are you really arguing corporations aren't driven by quarterly and annual results?

Have you ever seen companies beat their quarterly earnings estimates, and yet their stock drops? That's because the shareholders were suspicious that those results were short term, and the long term outlook didn't look so hot.

Any shareholder that is suspicious that a corporation has sacrificed the long term for short term profits, is going to dump that stock. Wouldn't you?

Investors are not a single unified hive mind. Some people don't care about long term profitability - they are just in a relatively short-term position and want profits now in the form of dividends and increased price. Some people want the valuation and/or price to go down because they hold short positions. Some people want the company to forego dividends in favor of investment into long-term expansion while other people are hoping for those dividends as part of their retirement income. This is true for institutions too - they have all sorts of reasons to prefer short term gain as much as they want long term gain.

Haha, the stock will tank on bad future prospects faster than you can sell. Being a short-termer in a stock only works if the other stockholders are in it for longer than you are, and believe in the long-term prospects.

Dividends are not a sign of short term investing. When the company's profits decline from short term thinking, the dividends disappear.

BTW, if you identify a company that is short-terming, and the other investors haven't caught on and tanked the stock, you can make a mint by shorting the stock. Got any success stories at that? Have you made money shorting McDonald's?