Ken Blanchard Quotes

Don't shortchange the future, because of fear in the present.

I never try to imagine the future. I kinda think it's a waste of time. I live in the now.

There aren’t enough people who care about the future. They are too busy worrying about today and what they can grab now

People are willing to get short-term gains at the risk of long-term choices.

The Congress is not willing to think about the long term. They act like activist shareholders, to use that phrase again. They're not thinking about what can we do that will make us richer, safer, and stronger next year, and the year after, and five and 10 years out.

If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.

He is short-sighted who looks only on the path he treads and the wall on which he leans.

Whatever a leader does now sets up what he does later. And there's always a later.

I don't care what happens in 100 years. I won't be around.

If you think of people as making decisions actively, every time we think about the cup of coffee, we say, "How much will I enjoy the cup of coffee, what else could I not do in the future because I buy this cup of coffee?

How can we trace out the links between actions that people take today and really long-term outcomes for humanity - outcomes that stretch out indefinitely into the future? I call this effort macrostrategy - that is, to think about the really big strategic situation for having a positive impact on the long-term future. There's the butterfly effect: A small change in an initial condition could have arbitrarily large consequences.

If you think about the long term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.

When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.

Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.

I never think of what it's going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking.

There are two kinds of people: one who goes on thinking about the future, not bothering about the present at all. That future is not going to come, that future is just a fool's imagination. I don't think about the future. I am a totally different kind of person. I don't think about the future at all, it is irrelevant.

The only thing that matters is here and the only thing that matters is now. And America's inability to delay gratification is because we do not have eternal thinking.

A management decision is irresponsible if it risks disaster this year for the sake of a grandiose future.

Whilst large organisations need foresight, they are also notorious in their bias for short term thinking, sometimes rejecting or even suppressing foresight.

It is always the sign of the second-rate man when the decision merely meets the present situation. It is the left-over in a decision which gives it its greatest value. It is the carry-over in the decision which helps develop the situation in the way we wish it to be developed. The ablest administrators do not merely draw logical conclusions from the array of facts of the past which their expert assistants bring to them; they have a vision of the future.

I think the most important thing is to take the long view on things. We live in such a 24/7, Twitter-fed, constant news cycle, and everything's a crisis, everything is terrible, everything is doomsday, everything is - if it doesn't get solved tomorrow, your presidency is going off the rails.

The most damaging aspect of contemporary living is short-term thinking.

They used to ask: "How will this decision that we make today affect our people in the future?" Now we make decisions based on: "How does it affect me, now? How does it affect the next shareholders meeting, three months ahead? How does it affect my next political campaign?"

If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish.