#401 – Jan. 2, 2025 [6 Minute Read]
Welcome to a new year, strategy-makers! Here are some insights, frameworks and tools to help you make better strategic decisions in 2025…
Three Off the Top:
What Employees Say Matters Most to Motivate Performance:
McKinsey research reveals that 72% of workers identify investing time and energy into goal setting as a strong motivator.
In a report from Charter Pro, a research group focused on the future of work, senior McKinsey partner Brooke Weddle says employees respond very well to having goals. “We think that employees want to drive and be independent and do their own thing, but actually people want to have goals and they want to know where they stand.”
Weddle’s advice for managers: • Involve employees in defining and setting goals, which fosters ownership of results. • Simplicity matters — many performance-management systems become confusing, intricate and time consuming and just die under their own weight. • Rely on data that are measurable, concrete, and easily adapted as goals evolve. • Incorporate non-financial incentives to drive motivation.
“People just want a really simple system to understand where they stack up, and then they want to understand how to get ahead in that context.”
AI Video Suddenly Got Very Good:
AI image creation has become really impressive over the past year, with models that can now run on laptops and produce images indistinguishable from real photographs. But a major leap in capability, artificial intelligence expert Ethan Mollick notes, came last month with AI text-to-video generators.
In December, OpenAI released its powerful Sora tool and then Google released its even more powerful Veo 2 video creator. (You can play with Sora now if you subscribe to ChatGPT Plus.) Take a look at Mollick’s compilation of 8-second video clips (the limit for right now, though the AI can apparently do much longer movies) — each one is generated from a short bit of text. Really impressive, and a little daunting! [Source: One Useful Thing ]
Making Change in Systems: Nodes, Roads and Connections
This is Strategy: Make Better Plans, by marketing expert Seth Godin, has just been selected as one of the 25 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year. It speaks to his philosophy of becoming — that strategy is a flexible plan (not a goal and list of tactics) that guides us and clarifies what we want to change and the impact we want to make in the world.
At entry #11 (it’s written in blog style), he quotes Stewart Brand’s observation that in comparing a map of Boston from 1924 to one in 2024, almost all the buildings have changed, yet few of the major roadways have. It reflects how we use such a network.
The buildings are nodes in the system, and roads are the connections. Godin notes that buildings (and people) get replaced all the time, while roadways (and the rules of any system) “fight like crazy to stay the way they are”.
If we’re intent on making change, we must leverage the connecting relationships and all that perpetuates those well-worn ways of doing things.
Drill Down:
Your Personal Review: Looking Back to Plan Ahead
In his Curiosity Chronicle newsletter, Sahil Bloom shares a stimulating set of year-end review questions to help you reflect and make course corrections for 2025.
- What did I change my mind on this past year? Successful leaders expect to be wrong sometimes. They embrace new information as “software updates” to their brain, which might involve your own rules of habit or changes in operating context.
- What created energy? Review your 2024 calendar to consider the types of activities, people and projects where you spent the most time. Did they create energy in your life? Can you focus more on energy generators and less on drains?
- What were the “boat anchors” in my life? Eliminate people, mindsets and habits that create drag. Boat anchors include self-sabotaging behaviours, self-limiting beliefs and stories, bad habits, and people who belittle or diminish your efforts.
- What did I not do because of fear? The thing you fear most is often the thing you most need to do. Deconstruct the fears that held you back: What would have been the downside if I had taken action? What was the upside if I had taken action?
- What were my greatest hits and worst misses this past year? Bloom notes your natural bias skews how you see your performance and life: The optimist sees all the hits; the pessimist all the misses. Take a balanced view.
- What did I learn this past year? Albert Einstein said: “When you stop learning you start dying.” It is worth taking the time to write down the lessons you’ve learn from hard experience, skill-building and opportunities to develop your knowledge
If you want to go deeper and prefer filling in a booklet, consider this free template from the team at YearCompass. Another list we like comes from Alberta consultant Michael Kerr: personal favourites include considering what surprised you most and summarizing the year in just one word.
For Your Reading List:
The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End. Daniel Howe and colleague William Strauss studied 500 years of modern history to develop their generational theory and uncovered a distinct pattern — it seems to move in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years (the length of a long human life), evolving through four eras or “turnings”. In this updated volume, the authors explore how the collective personality of each living generation is shaped by each turning of political, social, and economic challenges. Their findings provoke us to make sense of the current crises, conflicts and polarizations today, and to consider how all of us will be affected differently in the decade to come.
Closing Thought: Mastery
“Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work.”
— Entrepreneur and Author Derek Sivers (from How to Live)
Vol. 25, No. 1 — Copyright 8020Info Inc. 2025