The late Benjamin Graham, known to many as the father of value investing, once said: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine”.
It’s one of those quotes that becomes more useful the longer you spend around markets, leadership and people.
In the short term, everything is judged by the scoreboard.
The price moved. The trade worked. The fund outperformed. The team won. The decision must have been right.
But real life is rarely that neat.
I was reminded of this while listening to Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen, who manages the largest publicly held financial fund in the world (the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund).
Tangen was in conversation with Kinnevik CEO Georgi Ganev and former Kinnevik chair James Anderson.
He asked a question that went straight to the heart of accountability: how badly would Ganev have to perform before Anderson would make a very different kind of phone call?
Anderson’s answer stayed with me: “I think it should be about the calibre of the decision-making more than the outcome.”
Simple. Calm. But deeply strategic.
That line matters because of who it came from.
James Anderson spent decades at Baillie Gifford, where he managed the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust from 2000 to 2022 and delivered extraordinary long-term returns.
He was an early backer of businesses such as Amazon, Tesla and Alibaba when many people thought those calls were too ambitious, too risky, or too far ahead of the curve.
When someone with that record says the outcome is not always the best measure of the decision, it’s worth listening.
We live in a world that is obsessed with results
A position rises and we call the investor brilliant.
A share price falls and we question the thesis.
A business misses a quarterly target and confidence disappears.
The scoreboard becomes the story.
But outcomes and decisions are not the same thing.
A good decision can produce a bad short-term result. A poor decision can be rewarded by luck. A disciplined investor can be early. A reckless one can be temporarily right.
That is what makes leadership, investing and strategy so difficult.
The world does not give immediate marks for quality of thought.
This is where the Arsenal story becomes useful …
When Mikel Arteta took over in 2019, Arsenal was not where supporters wanted it to be. The criticism was loud. The patience was thin. The phrase ‘Trust the process’ became both a belief and, at times, a punchline.
For several seasons, the outcome did not fully reflect the quality of the work being done. The club finished second three times in a row.
To some, that looked like failure.
But beneath the result, something was being built: structure, discipline, recruitment clarity, tactical identity, emotional resilience and a culture that could withstand pressure.
Then, in May 2026, Arsenal was crowned Premier League champion for the first time in 22 years.
The outcome finally caught up with the process.
That is the point Anderson was making
The real test is not whether every decision works immediately.
The real test is whether the decision was made with clarity, discipline and integrity, based on what was knowable at the time.
For investors, this is not just philosophical. It is practical.
If we only reward outcomes, we create the wrong incentives. People become afraid to be early. They hide behind consensus. They make decisions that are easy to defend rather than decisions that are truly thoughtful.
They start optimising for approval instead of truth.
A serious investment culture needs something deeper. It needs the courage to ask better questions.
Not only ‘Did it work?’ but ‘Was the thinking sound?’
Was the evidence strong?
Were the risks understood?
Was the time horizon appropriate?
Would we make the same decision again under the same conditions?
That is how you separate luck from skill
It is also how you build trust.
Because trust is not built by pretending every call will be right.
It is built by showing that every call has been made with care, honesty and discipline.
The market will always have moments where it misprices effort, patience and quality. Leadership will always be tested before the result arrives.
And the best decisions will often feel uncomfortable before they look obvious.
So before you judge the next investment, business call or strategic decision by its immediate outcome, pause.
Ask yourself one question: was the calibre of the decision good enough to be repeated?
Andrew Padoa is a portfolio manager at Otto1890.
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