Long-Term Carping

For years, the rap on American managers has been that they're short-term thinkers, cowed by Wall Street--the nerve!--to make the quarterly number or see their stock price sacrificed to the earnings gods. What this country really needed, said the pundits and business professors, was a group of CEOs who had the guts to go long. Now, at (long) last, a new generation of managers, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Tim Koogle of Yahoo, Steve Case of America Online and Tom Jermoluk from @Home, has emerged to do exactly that, through aggressive acquisition strategies, massive infrastructure spending and expansion at a...