Yet this is what too many of our public companies are doing: cannibalizing their long-term value by destroying their own brand, squeezing vendors, shortchanging customers, failing to invest in employees, and using the company’s resources to enrich insiders and activist investors via financial engineering. All of these activities share the same problem: They work only in the short term. In companies that have grown a sufficiently large and productive “forest” over years or decades, there’s an awful lot of firewood to be cut down before the damage becomes evident. This is the inevitable result
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