Long-Term Liabilities

Debts you owe that aren’t due for over a year. That’s the traditional company accounting definition. Short-term liabilities come due in a year or less. But the term is kinda edgier than this. That is, a company that is beginning to cut costs in its call centers, moving more and more service to robots before the robots are really ready...or moving things overseas to operators who don’t speak the relevant language well enough…is creating a long-term liability in the form of its own brand equity destruction.

That long-term liability is the viability of the growth of the company. Liabilities come in many flavors, and you don’t want them. See: Kodak for details. It used to be one of the great companies in America; the long-term liability was a consumer shift to digital photography. Kodak could have been Canon or Nikon or even Apple, but they cut costs when they should have invested, and now they’re pretty much dead meat. Oh so not a Kodak Moment.