We want more - Who wins the fight between company performance and Wall Street analysts?

I have over the years wondered why U.S. companies are so focused on short-term results vs. long-term success, and have never been satisfied with the answers I have found. Over time, however, one thing has become abundantly clear; businesses are not the only ones controlling their financial success, financial analysts play a large part too.

Over the past several months, two companies that I have some peripheral ties to, Best Buy and 3M, have both posted record year-over-year earnings results. Yet in both cases, despite achieving and surpassing their own financial goals, financial analysts on Wall Street have viewed this as an overall negative, telling people that the companies did not meet their expectations, thus resulting in substantial per-share losses for share holders.

Although this is just one example, it is pervasive and ongoing and has lead me to question if industry analysts wield a disproportionate amount of power over both companies and their share holders. Do the analysts' short-term expectations force a business to  focus nearly exclusively on next quarter's financial results, and does this again make it impossible for an organization to plan and execute strategically?

When I was in graduate school about 20 years ago, we marveled at ( and envied, I suspect) the Japanese car industry's ability to plan 20 - 30 years into the future to gain a foothold and eventually dominate the U.S. marketplace. In my own experience, I have spent a considerable amount of time working with others to plan strategies spanning years, only to have them unravel because corporate demands for more immediate, short-term results took precedence. We became so obsessed with these short-term results that any type of planning  beyond a 3-month window fell by the wayside. Having this happen at one company might be an aberration, but when it becomes as commonplace as I have experienced, it becomes frightening.

I understand that public companies are closely tied to their analysts for a whole slew of reasons, but as shareholders, we should have the right to question these corporations about how beholden they have become to these same analysts. Posting record earnings is an achievement to be celebrated, not something to be dreaded.

What are your thoughts?