Managing for the Short Term: The New Rules for Running a Business in a Day-to-Day World

As managers, senior executives, and CEOs all over have painfully discovered, if you don’t manage for the short term, you won’t be around for the long term. Bestselling business author Chuck Martin found that nothing consumes business managers more than how to manage a company in the weeks and months immediately ahead.
As founder of NFI Research, an executive think tank made up of some 3,000 high-level executives at over 1,400 companies, Chuck Martin has interviewed and gathered the results of thousands of management specialists the world over to discover how companies are successfully zeroing in on improving short-term performance, while still balancing these efforts with long-term strategic goals. By looking to managers and executives at companies like IBM, SAP, Deloitte & Touche, Kraft, AT&T, Dow Chemical, and hundreds of others, Martin has uncovered the “best practices” that help propel short-term performance. Among them:

•Bridging the enormous disconnect between management’s strategic goals and the ability of front-line managers and employees to implement these goals

•Moving even the biggest projects forward incrementally, delivering tangible results at each step along the way

•Putting together time-based and events-based teams that can focus specifically on essential short-term decisions and goals

•Creating incentives to reward short-term results

What Chuck Martin has found is that companies that adopt practices designed to achieve short-term results are usually better positioned to achieve their long-term strategies as well.

A critically important management book that addresses one of the overriding concerns of businesses today, Managing for the Short Term is an essential addition to any manager’s toolkit.


"Managing for the short term is not simply about moving faster. It is about moving smarter. It is about effective implementation and operation within the context of mission and vision. Strategy is implemented through a series of small steps and rapid, short-term decisions within that long-term view. It forces managers to become more effective at achieving the measurable results required by today's climate."
From Managing For the Short Term