By Sydney Mabalayo, Strategy and Business Development Director: SPM
Every leadership team faces a familiar dilemma: how to meet the targets in front of them without eroding the foundation that will sustain the business five years from now. It’s one of the hardest tensions to hold — because success in the short term feels tangible, measurable, and immediately rewarding. Long-term strategy, by contrast, is often invisible until it’s too late to course-correct.
Most businesses are not short of ambition. What they often lack is rhythm — the ability to move between short-term execution and long-term intent without losing balance. I’ve seen strategy sessions where the conversation starts with a ten-year vision and ends with a debate about next quarter’s numbers. Both matter, but when the immediate constantly hijacks the important, the organisation becomes reactive. It starts managing activity instead of shaping direction.
Short-term wins are not the enemy of vision. In fact, they are essential signals. They show that the strategy is connecting with the market, that the team’s effort is yielding traction. The problem arises when those wins become the whole story. I’ve watched businesses deliver record quarters only to discover later that they’d trained their teams to optimise for speed rather than substance. The result? Momentum without meaning.
Balancing the two demands uncomfortable honesty. Leaders must ask: Are we celebrating progress or performance? Are we measuring growth by the numbers on a dashboard, or by the quality of capability we’re building beneath them? The first produces quick applause; the second builds staying power.
Long-term vision needs protection. It needs leaders willing to slow down the pursuit of instant results to safeguard strategic coherence. It also needs storytelling — because people work harder for a purpose they understand. When teams can see how today’s work contributes to a bigger narrative, they stay engaged even when results take time. That connection turns patience into momentum.
This balance also requires courage in communication. It’s not easy to explain to a board or investors why you’re diverting resources from high-return activities to build capacity that might not pay off for years. Yet, that’s often where the real inflection points lie — in the decision to trade immediacy for resilience. Every strong business eventually reaches that crossroads.
The companies that endure are not the ones that reject the short term, but the ones that use it wisely. They treat each success as a stress test of their strategy: does this result move us closer to our purpose, or merely faster down the wrong road? They learn to celebrate quick wins without mistaking them for proof of long-term health.
Vision is rarely a straight line. Markets shift, competitors move, priorities change. But the role of strategy is to ensure those shifts don’t turn into drift. When leaders hold the tension between urgency and patience — delivering what matters now while protecting what will matter later — they create businesses that not only perform, but endure.
