The short sight of growth at all costs

This is article 2 of 4 in The Long Focus series. Here is article 1.

Earlier in this series, I wrote about the difference between forcing an outcome and sensing what a situation actually needs. That conversation took a turn I didn't expect, into eyesight, of all things, and it gave me a way to explain something I've watched happen inside companies for thirty years without ever having the right language for it.

Not opposites, a balance

Business speak tends to view masculine and feminine leadership as opposing teams. Pick one, defend it, argue the other is soft or reckless. I've never found that useful, and neither does the framework I'm working through here. The masculine and the feminine aren't opponents. They're both required in equal doses. Though the world we've built runs on far too much of one and nowhere near enough of the other.

Stereotypically, the masculine mode is linear. Give me the goal, and I will get you there. Useful on a deadline. Useful in a crisis. Useful when a company needs to hit a number by quarter end. I built a career on this mode, and it worked, as far as it went.

The feminine mode pays attention to everything the linear approach filters out. Stuff like the wider system, the quieter signals, and the things that don't show up on a dashboard but shape whether the dashboard numbers mean anything six months from now. In my experience, most organisations have almost none of this second mode built into how they operate, and they don't notice, because the first mode keeps producing results right up until it doesn't.

A story about eyesight that isn't really about eyesight

Here's the detour that made this click for me. A person who has spent years going short-sighted, needing glasses for anything at a distance while seeing perfectly up close, learned something about why. Short sight is connected to overfocus. Tense the muscles around the eyes, narrow the field of vision onto whatever is directly in front of you, and the eye adapts to seeing close and only close.

The fix isn't more effort in the same direction. It's relaxing the focus enough to let the eye take in distance again.

I sat with that image and metaphor for much longer than I expected to. Because that is exactly what happens inside a company that has spent years optimising for one number.

What overfocus looks like on a balance sheet

Growth at all costs is that short sight with a P&L attached. You tense every part of the organisation around one metric, usually revenue or shareholder return, and the tightening works. You hit the number. You do it again next quarter. What you stop seeing is everything outside the frame. Things like the culture eroding, the talent quietly leaving, the supplier relationships being squeezed past the point they can absorb, and the communities absorbing costs the company never has to put on its own books.

I've sat in rooms where this was the entire strategy. Sharpen the focus. Ignore the periphery. It produces results the same way narrowing your vision produces a clear image of the thing directly ahead of you. It also produces the same blind spot, permanently, if nobody ever relaxes the focus back out.

GDP has the same condition

Zoom out from a single company to an entire economy, and the pattern repeats at scale. Gross domestic product measures one thing: the volume of economic activity. It says nothing about whether that activity improved anyone's life, whether it depleted something that can't be replaced, or whether the costs simply shifted to places the measurement doesn't reach.

We built an entire global system around optimising that one number, just as I built companies around optimising one number. In my experience, the results rhyme. Progress on the metric, and quiet damage everywhere the metric doesn't look.

This isn't an argument against growth. It's an argument against measuring only one thing and mistaking that measurement for the whole picture.

The part that gives me hope

Here's what stopped me from writing this off as one more diagnosis of a broken system. Over-focus is reversible. The person who went short-sighted from years of tensing up eventually found that deliberately and consistently relaxing that focus brought some distance vision back. Not instantly. Not without real effort. But it wasn't permanent damage. It was a habit the body had learned. And we both know habits can be relearned.

I think the same is true of how we run companies and economies. We tensed our way into this. We can, with real effort and without pretending it's simple, loosen our way back out.

Why I don't think this requires abandoning outcomes

I want to be clear about something because I think it gets lost whenever this conversation comes up. None of this means outcomes stop mattering. A business without results doesn't survive long enough to steward anything. The point isn't to drop the goal. The point is to stop letting the goal be the only thing in the visual field.

A hunter tracking prey still needs the wider periphery, the wind, the terrain, and the signs the target has moved. Drop the periphery entirely and you don't become a better hunter. You become one who catches less and understands less about why. Outcomes and awareness were never supposed to compete for the same attention. We just built organisations that treat them as though they do.

What this asks of a leader

Relaxing an organisation's focus without losing its results is not a soft skill. It's a harder discipline than pure force because force requires commitment to only one thing. Balance requires holding the target and the periphery simultaneously, and most of us were trained for the first but never taught the second.

I wasn't taught it either. I'm learning it now, later than I'd like, from a conversation about eyesight that had no business teaching me anything about business at all.

Where this leaves the reader

If you run something, a team, a company, a portfolio, ask yourself where you've been tensing for so long you've stopped noticing the tension. That's usually where the short sight has already set in. The good news, if the metaphor holds, is that you have more capacity to loosen it than you probably believe.

The next piece in this series takes the balance idea further, into a way of seeing systems as a whole rather than in pieces, and what that actually asks of a business that wants to last beyond the next quarter.

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