Thanks. If what I said appears to be a rant, I guess it is. And I could easily drift into a rant on the media for the reasons you said (their preference is to spike news events rather than reporting on them).

The balance part shouldn't be that difficult, unless a company has "evolved" to the pure Wall Street paradigm. Under that paradigm the senior officers of the firm focus on maximizing the metrics that the investment bankers dictate while keeping themselves from going to jail (at least there is now a compliance constraint with the US Sarbanes-Oxley legislation). The long term impact to the company doesn't really matter as long as the short term metrics are met. This really comes into play when a CEO is planning on retiring in XX months. He will gut anything in the organization that doesn't raise the stock price before his retirement date. He becomes a poster boy for Wall Street because he exceeded the bankers' expectations for the company. The stock price goes up, he retires and cashes in his stock options (he can legally do this because as an officer he has announced), and leaves the smoking results to his successor. The board doesn't say too much because as fellow CEOs they will do the same thing to their companies when they retire.

There is much to say here, but the obvious point I want to make is not be in the position to buckle to the metrics of hachet men.