The 3 years he quotes is from his perspective, which is from the view of "what company-spanning initiatives are we going to tackle" or "what teams and projects do we need to bootstrap or expand on?". It takes years for these things to get done and have the desired impact on the bottom line, but within those years are individuals and teams growing their respective businesses. Those businesses are absolutely monitored yearly/quarterly/weekly at some level of abstraction in the company.
How long it takes for work to have impact depends greatly on the scope of that work and the level of abstraction you're viewing the work at.
Part of the problem here is the place in the blog ascribes value to where you are rather than what you did. If nobody is asking how you influenced the current state of being but is instead just evaluating the person presiding over current success, then the behavior described is unsurprising.
