Reflection
It’s always full throttle around here this time of year. Forget about making our lists and checking them twice and getting ready for Christmas — decorations, cards, gifts, etc. We are minimalists in our home so it’s one tree, cards focused on New Years as sending them before Christmas is too big a lift.
As a family — we gave up gifts moons ago and all the presents and wrapping, and shopping, and ‘stuff’, investing in an annual gift of experience that takes all of us somewhere new once a year for precious and priceless time together. Ahhh the memories. Our clan is now 11 in size — four kids, two spouses, one long-time girlfriend, and two grandkids. It’s a menagerie and we’ll take it…. even with a partridge in a pear tree.
It’s planning season for our clients, and our “phones are ringing” about market size, adjacencies, possible acquisitions, benchmarks for budgets, and all that goes with the coming year. All of this happens while we are doing our own planning on the heels of the Outsell Signature Event. Reviewing too our strategies, business plans, budgets, team readiness, and prepping our own kick-off in January while we are supporting the kick-offs of our clients. We are at our most productive this time of year. It’s gratifying.
But the calls this past week have been different. To say last week’s news about Mr. Thompson shook many leaders to their core is an understatement.
I am thinking about the role of information in all that unfolded and the stories about misappropriated use of AI. And thinking about regulation coming down the pike in the US and abroad and wondering how it will, and if it will, help us to really make better decisions.
My colleague David Worlock thinks regulation about AI will start to travel down different paths — those impacting infrastructure, those impacting applications, those impacting certain use cases and industries (some regulated more than others to begin with.)
Will insurers be regulated in their use of AI for claim denials? Like any tool it can be used for good or bad in the right hands or the wrong ones. But what happens when it’s in insurers’ hands and our lives literally depend on them getting it right vs. doing us wrong? We are thinking about all this even more now.
One leader I spoke with this week wonders if the break in trust between CEOs and corporate ‘America’ can ever be mended. What is the role of social media, and media in general in all of this? What does this say about violence in America and our prolific use of guns? About mental health and the support one gets or doesn’t.
One said he and others in his network are asking themselves if shooting down CEOs will become ‘a norm’ — just like school shootings after Columbine. Calls like this have been going on my entire week. And each leader I speak with is reflective.
And then in the next sentences we talk about the PE cost squeeze we are under, the deal we lost to another bidder, other M&A we plan to do, and restructurings we are planning.
These calls I am having are so ‘normal.’ But then they are not. Is leadership worth it? What motivates us to take the helm of an organization? This comes up too. My colleague is planning our CEO meetings for February and established a theme around risk. Little did he know a new and ugly risk was looming — that now too is on our agenda.
There is so much to think about. The normal meets the not so normal. This is a reflective season like no other especially for the leaders in our industry. I have seen a lot of change in 30 years; heard a lot of reflection. Nothing ever like this.