So called ‘primitive’ animals – those that commonly live in a jungle (and our human ancestors some hundreds of millions of years ago) are driven in the main by short term impulses: perhaps to eat, sleep, reproduce or in response to stimuli to ‘fight or flight’.  The long term consequences of acting on impulse are not necessarily thought through: desire and fear determine the choice, with the short term priority on survival. 
Human society has created rules that save us from the ‘law of the jungle’ and we collaborate in groups, with a longer term vision about the survival of the group, perhaps even beyond our own lifetimes.  Civilisation and the effective functioning of commerce suppose that those laws – and values of respecting the long term mutual good – are respected.

In our own community of Business Excellence practitioners we defend a focus on the long term, against the ‘natural’ reflex of the organisation to defend short term selfish interests at the cost the wider good, or to long term sustainability of the organisation itself.  We have been able to agree upon and implement mechanisms which act as a counter-balance to the tendency to be short term driven: the Business Excellence model requires us to understand cause and effect relationships between the choices our organisations make, and in particular when and how we derive our profitability.

It’s not easy defending these choices right now.  The short term is the rule of the day – and the law of the jungle may well be taking precedent.  Delivering results matters a great deal for survival – and results may not be so easy to deliver right now: decision making cycles tend to be very rapid and choices may need to be reactive to swiftly changing market conditions.  

This necessary, indeed unavoidable focus on the short term still needs to be measured against the long term.  The fundamental concepts were derived and tested over previous periods in the cycle, both good and bad, and they have been shown to be valid for guiding the development of sustainable organisations.  The debate is not so much whether we want to let our organisations revert to primitive mechanisms of decision making, rather how we can best focus on the short term, while respecting a long term vision of what we stand for.