Perspective on Time Horizons

     A little more than ten years ago I was fortunate to spend a morning listening to Dr. Elliot Jaques discuss in an open forum many of the concepts that he had conceived during his illustrious career.  His notion of time horizons seems to ring truer today than at any other time.  For Jacques time horizons were the most useful and objective measure of the level and complexity of work.  While the janitor sweeping the shop floor might be thinking about what was for dinner, the assembly line worker might be more concerned with this week’s pay, a director of marketing more worried about marketing campaigns for next year, the chief executive SHOULD be looking to the future - even beyond his own time at the helm.  Jaques observed that organizations implicitly recognize this fact in everything from titles to salary: line workers are paid hourly, managers annually, and senior executives compensated with longer-term incentives such as stock options.

      Jaques identified seven different time horizons and argued that requisite organizations to be successful should assure the suitability of the employee’s time horizon to the task.  Indeed his research within the context of organizational development indicated that it was this disconnect that made for unhappy employees and failed businesses.  Jaques noted that in effective organizations workers with  differing time horizons worked  at a level where they felt comfortable. If a worker's job was beyond their innate time horizon, they would fail. Less and they would be insufficiently challenged. Level 1 encompasses jobs such as sales associates or line workers handling routine tasks with a time horizon of up to three months. Levels 2 to 4 encompass various managerial positions with time horizons between one to five years. Level 5 crosses over to five to 10 years and is the domain of chief executives. Beyond Level 5, one enters the realm of statesmen and legendary business leaders comfortable with 20 or 50 year time horizons.

     In a world where there is no shortage of short sightedness from egregious examples of greed and short term profits that led to the financial meltdown in 2008 to political leaders who make and change policy based on the latest polls, Dr. Jaques perspective that great leaders are those that tend to be visionaries is worth revisiting. Arguably problems like governement deficits are intractable because we have an electorate that is at Level 2 and elects maybe Level 3 politicians when we really need Level 5 solutions.