"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."—Mark Twain

Growing numbers of organizations—including banks on both sides of the Atlantic, a global natural-resources group, and a leading UK retailer—are adding an important new "stone" to the 21st-century business lexicon. "Performance and health" is a metaphor that derives its power from a simple comparison with the human body. Just as people may seem reasonably well today but may not have the physical condition for the rigors of a long and active life, so too companies that are profitable in the short term may not have what it takes to perform well year after year.

Managing companies for success across a range of time frames—a requisite for achieving both performance and health—is one of the toughest challenges in business. Recently, it has been especially hard: turbulent economic conditions, for example, have concentrated the collective minds of many executives on pure survival. The fact that 10 of the largest 15 bankruptcies in history have occurred since 2001 is a strong deterrent to business building, playing up its inherent risks.

Businesses complain that financial markets increasingly focus on quarterly results and give little credit to strategies...