Losing Sight Of The Horizon
“Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best."
- Lord Robert Baden-Powell
I am flying back from a trip to Chicago where my employer invested in leadership training for a few dozen employees. Giving its front-line management the tools needed to better serve its teams was important enough to the company that they were willing to not only incur the expense of flying in employees from throughout the country but also to take us away from our day-to-day tasks. This was an endeavor that showed the company was willing to reduce short-term profits in order to improve its long-term prospects.
Ironically, I passed a Carvana “vending machine” on the way to the hotel where the training session was held. Carvana was one of the companies that I interviewed with before being hired by my current employer. For this interview, Carvana flew me to its headquarters in Phoenix (in the middle of a pandemic) so that I could meet with the person who would be my manager in Los Angeles. An overnight stay was arranged for an interview that lasted about an hour.
When I returned home, the recruiter called to let me know that I did not get the job. In response to my request for input I was told that the solutions that I had presented were too focused on the “long term.” The company needed someone who was better focused on solving problems in the near term.
I found out later that the new site that I would have supervised ran into problems soon after it opened. The proper permits had not been secured prior to opening a storage facility at the Fairplex and they were forced by the city to shut down operations. It sounds like they could have used someone in management who was looking a little further into the future beyond just getting the operation up and running.
Carvana has run into problems at other facilities with customers having complained that the company had not correctly filed paperwork to transfer ownership of vehicles resulting in fines in the states of California, Texas, Michigan, North Carolina, and Florida. A county in North Carolina revoked its “dealer’s license for violating dealer licensing laws.”
Unfortunately, companies behaving like Carvana are more common than those who, like my current employer, aim toward the horizon. Wall Street rewards short-term results so companies chase immediate profits while sacrificing long-term assets like customer loyalty. Six Flags provided a perfect example of this trait over the summer when they removed free seating at the Hurricane Harbor water park outside Los Angeles so that they could charge their customers for access to priority seating areas. How many customers reluctantly paid this fee while swearing to themselves to never return?
Forget the sunscreen for a day of baseball? Wrigley Field supplies free sunscreen. What a great way to promote customer loyalty.
This short-sightedness is also not limited to corporate America. For example, when politicians neglect to fund special education services, they not only deprive our most vulnerable students of the services that they need, but they also miss an opportunity to lower costs in the future. A child who is given the resources to meet their full potential will be more self-sufficient and less dependent on government services as an adult.
This lack of focus on the future by organizations should not be any surprise in a culture that seems to be exclusively geared toward the near term. How much do consumers pay in credit card debt for items that long ago exceeded their usefulness? Do we take notice of our behavior as consumers contribute to the Earth’s rapidly rising temperatures? How many record-breaking disasters will it take for us to finally realize that we are the problem?
There used to be a time when we were confident that we were leaving a better world for our children than the one that we inherited. That is not the case anymore. Perhaps if we started looking towards the horizon we could return to those times.
Carl Petersen is a parent advocate for students with special education needs and public education. He was elected to the Northridge East Neighborhood Council and is the Education Chair. As a Green Party candidate in LAUSD’s District 2 School Board race, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action. Dr. Diane Ravitch has called him “a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles.” For links to his blogs, please visit www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own.