As the year wraps up, I’ve been reflecting on the lessons, questions, and discoveries that shaped my thinking this year. From creativity’s place in leadership to navigating workplace culture and overcoming those pesky bottlenecks, these posts capture the themes I found most impactful.
Whether you’re looking to shake up your leadership style, find your voice, or simply view challenges through a different lens—there’s something here for you.
Let’s dive into the highlights of the year. Happy reading, and cheers to more growth (and fewer bottlenecks) in the year ahead!
Top 10 Posts of 2024
1. How I Realized Creativity Is as Important as Leadership and Management – As we move forward in our careers, the question shouldn’t just be, “What are you managing?” or “What are you leading?” It should also be, “What are you creating?
2. The Unique Intervention Or The General Solution – As you consider how you are addressing your customers’ issues, are you providing solutions that might alleviate most of their problems, or are you crafting an intervention that uniquely resolves all of them?
3. Leadership Trends and Workplace Context: Navigating the Noise for Effective Leadership – The key to cutting through the noise isn’t to latch onto the latest book or theory. It’s to understand the context in which you’re operating.
4. The Super Market Shuffle – Before making a change, be aware of the intended and unintended consequences.
5. How I Found My Leadership Voice: A Personal Journey – Leadership is not about being the loudest in the room, but about using your voice to connect, inspire, and create growth—starting from wherever you are today.
6. Figuring Out Workplace Culture – Observing what people do, how they react, and what they say can reveal more about a company’s culture than anything published on a website.
7. Leaders are Builders – Leadership isn’t reserved for a particular kind of person. Usually, commitment to a goal or an objective is enough to motivate and inspire one to step forward and make a difference.
8. Bend, Don’t Break – As with anything in life, when you see change as an opportunity for growth, it becomes easier to adapt and be flexible.
9. Overcoming Bottlenecks in The Workplace – If you find yourself caught in a bottleneck, take a step back and evaluate the cause of the backlog. Is it due to time constraints, lack of interest, or something else? Often, breaking through a bottleneck can be achieved by reorganizing your time and looking at your work differently.
10. Fixed vs Fluid – In a constantly changing work environment, embracing a fluid approach to leadership significantly enhances your ability to adapt swiftly. With a fixed leadership style, adapting to new situations or innovating may be difficult, potentially leading to stagnation or failure.
Top 10 Posts of All Time
After writing over 1,220 posts since 2015, certain ideas, stories, and reflections have stood the test of time. These are the posts you’ve returned to, shared, and found valuable over the years—whether it’s about surviving chaos, sparking creativity, or transforming how we work and lead.
Here are the all-time favorites that continue to resonate, inspire, and challenge us.
1. Embracing the Storm: How to Survive in a Chaotic Workplace – While a chaotic workplace can be overwhelming, it also presents opportunities to learn and grow.
2. How to Introduce New Ideas – The faster you can get to the point where you confidently explain your idea in a few breaths, then the closer you’ll get to clarifying the value that you provide.
3. Creativity: Blending, Breaking, Bending – Blending, breaking, bending is how creativity grows.
4. The Industrial Revolution, Revisited: The Transformation of Work – For businesses working to scale up or for companies working to develop new initiatives, digital transformation strategies can make all the difference.
5. Using Patterns to Make Sense of Your World – Awareness of the basic patterns that exist in our world will help you see what’s happening around you in a different light. As a template, having an understanding of what might happen in a situation may give you the opportunity to create a different outcome than what you have seen before.
6. Creating Order in a Chaotic Work Environment – Rather than viewing a chaotic atmosphere as a setback, see it as an opportunity to instigate change and shape things according to your vision.
7. 5 Perspective Changing Quotes by Peter Senge – Peter Senge is the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization where he developed the notion of a learning organization.
8. Creating an Intervention Versus a Solution – Your actions to solve the problem of a client will have more relevance and staying power if what you create is uniquely tied to the context in which it will reside.
9. 20 Questions on Our Urban Future – Where we go will depend on what people need at that moment, sustained visionary leadership, and a growing tax base. What kind of partnership is necessary between citizens, government, and industry to help guide us to this or some other future?
10. How I Realized Creativity Is as Important as Leadership and Management – As we move forward in our careers, the question shouldn’t just be, “What are you managing?” or “What are you leading?” It should also be, “What are you creating?”
Wrapping Up
Whether you’re here for the highlights of the year or revisiting timeless insights, I hope these posts sparked ideas, shifted perspectives, and maybe even made your path forward a little clearer.
Thank you for reading, sharing, and exploring these thoughts with me. Here’s to creating more, leading with purpose, and navigating the twists and turns of 2025 together.
Cheers to the journey ahead!
