---
id: "concept-duration-of-the-company"
type: "concept"
source_timestamps: ["¶93", "¶94", "¶95", "¶96", "¶98"]
tags: ["leadership", "long-term-planning", "financial-strategy"]
related: ["concept-performance-with-purpose", "action-anticipate-future-liabilities", "quote-duration-of-company", "entity-org-kodak", "entity-org-xerox", "entity-org-polaroid"]
speakers: ["Indra Nooyi"]
definition: "Managing a corporation to ensure its survival and relevance over decades, explicitly rejecting short-term financial engineering optimized for a single CEO's tenure."
source_url: "https://hbr.org/2025/10/innovating-at-the-core-and-for-the-future"
source_title: "Innovating at the Core—and for the Future"
sources: ["futures"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-futures"
originDay: 2
articleStem: "hbr-cl-91-innovating-core-and-future"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2025/10/innovating-at-the-core-and-for-the-future"
sourceTitle: "Innovating at the Core—and for the Future"
---
# Duration of the Company Mindset

The principle that a CEO must manage a firm for its multi-decade lifespan rather than optimizing for their own personal tenure — crystallized in [[quote-duration-of-company]].

Nooyi critiques the common executive playbook: a CEO cuts investment to deliver high EPS growth over a five-year window, cashes out, and leaves the successor to declare a crisis and reinvest heavily. Instead, leaders must balance the **level** and **duration** of returns — finding a sustainable rate of return that satisfies investors while explicitly creating breathing room to invest in future capabilities. This is the financial engine behind [[concept-performance-with-purpose]] and the play [[action-anticipate-future-liabilities]].

Failing to adopt this mindset leads to the fate of [[entity-org-kodak]], [[entity-org-polaroid]], and the old [[entity-org-xerox]] — companies with great products that failed to invest in business-model transformation and got stuck in the past.

**Enrichment note.** Supported by Nooyi's public statements (short-termism 'has not done right by shareholders'), PepsiCo's long-term-performance framing, HBR/McKinsey research on short-termism, and independent case histories of Kodak's and Polaroid's slow response to digital imaging and Xerox's struggle to transition beyond copiers.


## Related across articles
- [[framework-optimizing-unknown]]
- [[concept-optionality]]