Strategy

December 15, 2025

Good morning!

Are you enjoying the warm glow of the waning crescent as it illumines the dawn? Happy Hanukkah! Helpful hint o’ the day: ADD a generous quantity of Sauerkraut to your Latke recipe for a delightful Eastern European twist to your tasty treats. Only six more days to go… until light starts to return! Peach dark when you get up, peach dark when you go to bed, cloudy all day… enough!

• Cause and effect?  Causation:  Remember your statistics?
  • Does the season put you in the mood for Tchaikowsky’s The Nutcracker — OR… does The Nutcracker put you in the  mood for the season?
• Backyard Bird Count on a Twenty-Below-Zero Day:  Cardinal — male & female, Slate-Colored Juncos, Black Cap Chickadees, Downy Woodpecker, Crows, Blue Jays, House Finches, Yellow Bellied Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Mallard Ducks — a whole flock of 30 male & female
• As many as three times as many travelers are showing interest in various destinations in Eastern Europe compared to a year ago.  (Kayak)
  • MIGHT be the latkes?
• Keep… kill… change… from MIT  (Fray)
  • What deserves to continue?
  • One year-end maneuver as an organization cleanse is a Keep — Kill — Change audit.
  • Here at Without A Vision we suggest starting with meetings.
    • Full-time employees now average about 18 hours per week in meetings… (Rogelberg)
    • This amounts to an average annual investment (waste?) of ~$80,000 per employee each year… to be sitting in meetings…
    • How it works:
      • Keep what is working well, delivering value, and serving organizational goals.
      • Kill what is wasting time, resources, morale, attention (focus).
      • Change what has value but needs re-thinking and adaptation…
    • What have you got to lose — or gain?
• I have zero data to back-up this opinion, but IMAO, genius marketing campaign by WalMart focused on the Grinch and WhoVille.  Genius.
• “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure.  You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively…”  (E. Roosevelt)
• “You will have critics… try not to be one of them.”  (Mackesy)
• REVIEW:  Six keys to building and sustaining a strong culture (Elliott, M.I.T. Sloan School, 2025)
  • Focus on nurturing dependability-based trust.
    • … confidence that colleagues will follow through on commitments — up and down, sideways — as the colloquialism goes:  I’ve got your back!
  • Cultivate a first team mindset — as opposed to functional silos…
    • … leaders prioritize their peer team over their functional silos
  • Leverage personal user manuals (we call them Contact notes) to build and sustain connection
    • Nothing more than personalizing the relationships, nothing new, but oh so hard to do because you have to CARE, be diligent, be curious…
  • Establish team agreements
    • Focused time together where productivity will be maximized for all
    • Decision-making protocols — and stay true to them
    • Communication expectations, styles, substance, response times, respecting time off
  • Focus on outcomes, not attendance
    • e.g., move away from monitoring activity to measuring impact
  • Design intentional gatherings that build belonging
    • Intentional in-person gatherings play a vital role in building connection (the team) and shared identity
• The biggest gap between strategy champions and stragglers is actually in mobilization — the crucial phase of translating strategic choices into organizational readiness.
  • Oh boy, do we know this one!
  • The most brilliant plans — and even the less brilliant ones — are likely to never get implemented.
  • Why?
  • Basic physics.
  • An object at rest tends to stay at rest — unless acted upon… and rarely does a strategy get properly acted upon
• You could probably create this list — and you probably have at different times.
  • But, it’s often helpful to write it down so you can reference it at times when you forget — and/or when you need a reminder.
  • Ten Reasons New Businesses Fail — and, for that matter, existing ones, too)
    1. Going it alone
    2. Growing too quickly
    3. Lack of experience
    4. Too much passion (emotion vs empiricism)
    5. Internal conflict
    6. Lack of capital
    7. Lack of a market (miscalculated, not researched, delusion)
    8. External variables (largely uncontrollable)
    9. Inability to pivot (inflexible, inattentive, lack of strategic perspective)
    10. Stubbornness  (Informed by Blackman, 2025)
• Book:  Here’s one if you can stomach it; I couldn’t:  The Zorg, Kara
  • Is this the absolute depths of depravity?