Steve Jobs once said trying to see 10 years into the future was a poor way to run a fast-moving technology company, arguing that long-range plans often turn blurry and rigid before they can be useful.

Jobs Favored Shorter Planning Horizons

In a 2001 interview with Japan's NHK that aired shortly after Macworld San Francisco, where Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) unveiled the Titanium PowerBook G4 along with media software such as iTunes and iDVD, Jobs brushed aside the standard question of where he saw himself a decade later. "My headlights are not that good," he said.

Instead, Jobs said he focused on a much shorter horizon. "I don't really think about it. I think about a year or two, three, down the road; we have some projects at Apple that are sort of maybe four years down the road… no probably like three or four at the most," he said.

Fast Change Made Long Plans Fragile

His logic was based on the fact that technology changes too quickly. In the same interview, Jobs goes on to mention that while some five-year planning is necessary, much of it gets overtaken by events, and when "something new happens," leaders have to be willing to "forget that" old destination and move somewhere else.

That philosophy fit Jobs' broader worldview. In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he said, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards," a line that captured his belief that judgment in the moment matters more than a rigid decade-long script.

Long View Mattered More For Teams

Still, Jobs did not reject long-term thinking altogether. In a 1992 MIT appearance, he said he had come to take "a longer-term view on people," adding, "we're building a team here… for the next decade, not just the next year."

Even so, Jobs' "bad headlights" did not stop him from calling major trends early, including portable tablet-like computers, a widely connected digital world and even the AI age.

Photo Courtesy: Kemarrravv13 On Shutterstock.com