cover image Short-Term America: The Causes and Cures of Our Business Myopia

Short-Term America: The Causes and Cures of Our Business Myopia

Michael T. Jacobs. Harvard Business School Press, $29.95 (268pp) ISBN 978-0-87584-300-1

In this uncommonly enlightening survey, Jacobs, a former U.S. Treasury Department corporate finance director, condemns as counterproductive the quick-profit approach of many of America's corporate directors and investor-owners. Such short-sightedness, he believes, undermines long-range product research, financing and marketing, and thus reduces America's industrial competitiveness with Japan and Germany. Sharply challenging the prevailing corporate structure, in which he discerns a lack of executive ``accountability,'' Jacobs also points out stubborn anomalies in the board-of-directors system and the roles of lender banks, bondholders and institutional share-owning investors. This comprehensive corrective plan includes banking reform that would expand and centralize ``cost-of-capital'' financial services; motivationally deferred stock-bonus management compensation; and investor/owner representation on a firm's board of directors. Fortune Book Club alternate. (Oct.)