It's short-term thinking because he's focusing his efforts on boosting the quarterly results. He's pandering to the major shareholders and the board in an effort to enrich them (and himself in the process). He demonstrates minimal forward-looking, long-term vision, and appears to be thinking only in three-month increments.
In his myopic pursuit of short-term gains, he's casting aside hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced hard-working employees at the store level. These actions may show improvements in the quarterly results for a short time, and Marvelous Marv may well get richer (as will his hedge-fund cronies and sycophantic followers), but the company itself will drift further and further away from its original purpose.
Like many companies before it, Lowes is being made to drift away from its original purpose, in favor of becoming just another excuse for manipulating money and numbers.
Lest we forget, Lowes was once all about helping people "love where they live", and we coupled that social responsibility with a coincidental drive to profitability. Now, unfortunately, it's all about money. Like Sears, Penney, GE, and a host of other fortune 500 companies, once they lost sight of their social responsibility, the end was not far behind.