10 danger signs of short-term thinking: you cannot acquire a reputation for excellent customer service in a day or build a brand in a week. Here are the warning signals that your bank is spending too much time focused on the less important day-to-day issues.

• Author: Graham, John
• Position: Strategic Planning - Column

The evidence continues to pile up that most of the nation's businesses are focused on short-term results. With boards, management, investors and analysts ready to strike if the numbers are "right," it's no wonder that everyone seems focused on immediate results.

Whatever the pressures to make the benchmarks, there's another side of the ledger--the benefits of thinking longer term, particularly in marketing and sales.

While there are always immediate needs, there are also long-range issues that deserve to be addressed. The care and tending of the brand is one of them. The care of customers is another, as is thinking through future growth issues and product/services refinements.

If you're interested in evaluating your organization in terms of its short-term orientation, here are 10 indicators that the longer term may be suffering.

1 No planning or plan. It seems as if what passes as planning is often nothing more than talk. Little gets actually nailed down. Meetings end with an aura of vagueness in the room. Even if assignments are made, there's often little follow-up. Everyone knows that nothing has changed and nothing is going to happen.

The clearest, easiest way to understand good planning may be something like this: "Who's going to do what to whom, why and when?"

2. Scrambling for sales. "We've got to get sales up" is the common cry. Throw together a quick "sales contest."

   Yet, these same organizations are short on consistent prospecting programs. Their sales reporting systems focus on what's happening last week and what's coming next week, not on thinking about the far more demanding task of finding ways to grow the business.

   Developing, implementing and managing a carefully crafted prospecting program that has management's support is the ultimate answer to increasing sales. Yet, we find quick fixes more attractive than the hard work involved in program management.

3. Jumping from one activity to another. Broken field running is a fine art in many organizations. Everyone dashes around zigging and zagging, looking for an opening. Unfortunately, they are not as agile as they like to think they are. First it's a sales contest, next comes a newsletter, then it's an e-mail blitz or a broadcast fax.

4. Constant crises. Periodic crises occur, of course. It's the pattern that's the problem. One business executive said, "I think something's wrong if we're not having a crisis." Even if there is marketing and sales planning, the programs are often...