Mark Walport Quotes

I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.

Today's tactical victory does not guarantee tomorrow's strategic success.

I'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

Globalization requires taking a broad contextual and long-term view.

One of the primary reasons why the human brain has evolved to look so far into the future is so that we can take actions in the present that will bring us to a better future rather than a worse one.

Instead of looking at the past, I put myself ahead twenty years and try to look at what I need to do now in order to get there then.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.

The passage of time is likely to make high-speed rail more and more desirable, making it critical that politicians of today think ahead to tomorrow.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

I must analyze, from what I do now, what will be the impact two or three or five years in the future. What is the statement I want to make?

Short-term thinking is the greatest enemy of good government.

It is statesmanlike for the administration and Congress to look to our nation's welfare beyond their terms in office.

Neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily taken for the future.

In order to have your short term policies accepted, you have to have your long term policies understood.

Defending yesterday … is far more risky than making tomorrow.

When everyone is running the machine, and it's all working, there's a tendency to look at the short term and focus on incremental opportunities and not look ahead to the really big opportunities.

I always say that my job is not to think about today. My job is to look around the corner and feel and see what's coming, and then warn everybody else.

Look several months ahead, see where the obstacles lie, and figure out ways to overcome them.

Short-termism is no longer an option. We have to envisage humanitarian action with a medium- and long-term perspective.

If one sees far, structural changes that come with temporary disruptions can be growth- and efficiency-augmenting in the medium to long term.

We've got to be innovative. We've got to think about what's coming next.

There are players who tend not to look at the money short-term: they have a bigger plan.

When I plan ahead, I don't just plan what I'm doing tomorrow. I also plan what I'm doing five years from now.