Short term Vs Long Term - Difficult to decide once you are listed

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/logistics/article2452876.ece

After reading the article, it is difficult to say whether the
government was too conservative in its estimates of projects or the
players too aggressive in their bidding with traffic projections. But
it is hard to believe that the difference can be so huge that a
positive grant projects turns into a negative grant project. All I can
say at this point is, the players are hungry for order book or sales
and may be are willing to compromise on the margins. Something that
happened with the aluminium conductor industry during FY2009 and
FY2010. PGCIL did not release orders and players went extremely
aggressive in bidding, since these contracts take time to execute, the
actual effect was felt only towards the second half of 2010 and the
entire 2011. Would not a similar situation arise, market will cheer
them for the short term increase in order book but when the execution
happens the problems will begin to show up in the P&L statement. One
more classic example... the air conditioning majors like blue star
entered into the EMP segment and have been badly hit due to the
different nature of the business. They also in order to keep the
revenues growing bid for projects at extremely competitive rates and
now are facing the same problems of low margins or negative margins.
And now they say they will look at managing costs better and improving
the payment terms. Ridiculous. The RoE in the mean time for Blue star
have dropped from the highs in 2009 to the lows it has witnessed now.
I am nowhere saying, that the managemnet of the company is inefficient
all i think is how being listed on stock exchanges and showing the
analysts an increasing trend in sales affects the ability of the
companies to see what their actions will do in the future over just a
slightly long term period say 1-2 years.

Yesterday i read an interesting interview by Samir Arora of Helios
Capital.. He says the markets have become increasingly short term, i
would say they were never long term, analysts are always right on the
short term side of the game, on the long term as i see only two things
can be predicted
1 . The competitive advantage/durability of the moat and you buy this
at a decent price
2. Normailized earnings

Predicting anything else seems a waste of time.