Co-authored by Conor Kehoe .

Dominic Barton is the Global Managing Director of McKinsey & Company. Conor Kehoe is a Director in McKinsey's London office.

Mindsets matter. For more than two years, we and others have been talking about the need to shift the prevailing view among managers, boards of directors and investors from "quarterly capitalism" to what we call "capitalism for the long term" . Together with Harvard Business Review and the Management Innovation eXchange, we have issued a challenge calling for the most instructive case studies and provocative ideas that will help us re-imagine capitalism for the long term.

Despite promising signs of change, such as a growing turn away from the standard practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance, old attitudes die hard. More and more, we realize, the crucial first step is to tackle our deeply embedded intellectual frameworks. Beliefs drive actions and altering our belief systems will ultimately do more than anything else to amplify and reinforce the kinds of behavioral changes that, in the end, are the only measure that counts. In this blog post we'd like to focus on two belief...