Quarterly misses aren't quarterly problems
A chief executive spends 47 per cent of their time on the next twelve months, and 16 per cent on anything beyond five years. That is PwC's 29th Global CEO Survey, published in January, across 4,454 chief executives in 95 countries.
Read that as a discipline problem and you reach the wrong conclusion. It is not a failure of attention. It is an accurate response to what the job currently rewards.
In 2025 a record 234 chief executives left their roles. Exits inside the first thirty to thirty-six months rose 79 per cent. In the same year there were 255 activist campaigns, also a record.
So the role now comes with a short runway, quarterly scrutiny, and an expectation of growth that takes years to build. Spending half your attention on the next twelve months is not short-termism. It is survival, and anyone in the chair would do the same.
What follows from it is the part worth examining.
The quarterly response to a quarterly miss
When the quarter misses, the response is almost always quarterly. Tighten the forecast. Push the pipeline. Run a cost programme. Replace the commercial leadership. Each one is defensible, each can be started on Monday, and each has an owner who can be held to it.
And the misses keep coming.
Hidden friction is the cost that builds up where an organisation's layers meet: the delay, rework, escalation and lost margin that no single team owns because no single team can see it. It is hidden not because anyone is concealing it, but because every function experiences only its own side of it.
That is why the quarterly response never reaches it. Every quarterly fix is scoped to something a function can own. The thing producing the misses is not owned by a function, so it is not in scope for any of the fixes, and it survives all of them.
The evidence that the cause sits between functions
Until recently this was an argument from observation. It is now measurable.
Gartner found that 84 per cent of people report high collaboration drag from cross-functional work, and that organisations with high drag are 37 per cent less likely to hit their revenue goals. Not less efficient. Less likely to hit revenue.
That is the connection between the symptom and the cause, and it is someone else's data rather than mine. The friction between functions is not a cultural inconvenience to be addressed when there is time. It is a revenue variable, and it is roughly a third of the outcome.
The same study found something more uncomfortable. People carrying high collaboration drag are fifteen times more likely to report burnout. So the organisations least able to work across functions are also the ones whose people have least appetite for another cross-functional programme. The problem defends itself.
Efficiency bought the capacity. Nothing decided where it went.
Most large organisations have spent the last three years on efficiency, and most of that work was necessary. It also did what it was designed to do: it released capacity.
Efficiency makes each part of the business leaner. It does not decide what the freed capacity is now for, and it cannot, because that decision does not sit inside any of the parts. An organisation that finishes a cost programme with spare capacity and no shared view of where growth comes from will quietly spend that capacity on more of what it was already doing.
I have helped design programmes that did exactly this, and reported them as successes, because against their own objectives they were.
Even the regulator is moving
In May the SEC proposed permitting optional semiannual reporting for public companies. Whatever becomes of it, the premise is worth noticing: that the quarterly reporting cycle may itself be shaping behaviour in ways nobody chose.
If that is being examined at the level of market structure, it is worth examining at the level of your own organisation. Not whether your leadership team is too focused on the quarter, which it has to be, but whether anything in your operating rhythm is looking at the thing the quarter is a symptom of.
In most businesses the honest answer is that nobody is, because nobody owns it.
What a leadership team can actually do
Not a transformation programme. The three years just described are precisely why there is no appetite for one, and a programme that needs a year to show anything is not a credible ask of someone with three.
Two things that fit inside a quarter.
Name the owner of the space between functions. Not a committee. A person, with the authority to call a decision that crosses two teams, and a place in the operating rhythm where that happens. Most organisations discover, when they try to name this person, that the role does not exist and never did.
Then establish whether your leadership team sees the same organisation. Ask four leaders in different functions to describe, separately and without conferring, where growth is currently being lost. Compare the four answers. If they match, you have a focused problem and you can go and solve it. If they do not, the spread between them is the thing to work on first, and you have found that out in an afternoon rather than a year.
Neither of those protects the quarter. Both of them make it possible to stop paying for the same miss repeatedly.
Quarterly misses are not quarterly problems. The quarter is where the cost surfaces. It is not where the cause lives, and three years of quarterly fixes is how organisations find that out the expensive way.
