WE CAN DO REAGAN'S, WITH TWEAKS

I surprisingly found myself crying when Logan Roy finally died this week on Succession (+1 to the LA Times for that obit!). And apparently, I'm not alone. Whether it's cousin Greg's absurd testimony, Logan's potty-mouth, Connor's ridiculous grasp of his polling at 1%, or Kendall painfully rapping to honor Logan. I love them all.

There is a line from Logan that my husband brings up repeatedly. It comes in a (per usual) heartbreaking scene with his daughter Shiv, where he betrays her and walks back his support of her in a leadership role. It's horrid leadership and parenting, but the line itself stands. It is: 

Everything everywhere is always moving, forever. 
 

My husband likes to bring this up when we're talking about how quickly things are changing. AI developments? Always evolving. Financial system? Always fluctuating. The Economy? Always shifting. Your company culture? Always progressing. The cells of each human being, always changing. The only certainty is change, yet humans are so resistant to that notion. We are often confronted with our own resistance to change when it comes to entrepreneurship. 

NAVIGATING CHANGE

When I teach leadership, I always have founders write their job descriptions. This is an often overlooked process. We barely bring this clarity to our team, and when it comes to ourselves, we tend to overlook the need completely. But one of the main responsibilities of a founder's job description includes the essential function of navigating change—professionally and personally. It is a core skill that any founder or manager needs to grow.

In 2023, I have seen more companies in flux than any other year of my 11 consulting. Many companies are facing major internal restructurings of team members, many are facing dramatic culture changes, and so many are facing sweeping changes to their approach to business development and growth. Influencers no longer want to influence, and robots are seeing no desire to be robots in 2023. It's an exciting time but a time of fear, stress, and worry for many. 

TAKING A TIME OUT

I was listening to Rick Rubin's new podcast, Tetragrammaton, and his first guest was the legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson. My brain almost exploded to hear these two conversing for almost three hours. If you aren't familiar with Phil's approach to coaching and life, it's deeply spiritual. Influenced by the fact that both of his parents were preachers and he eventually connected to meditation and Native spirituality. They talked about the importance of being centered and how he does that himself, but more importantly, how he taught it and demanded it from his players. He shared that time-outs can often be used as an opportunity for recenter, but sometimes he had to pull players and bench them until they could recenter themselves. He knew that the key to navigating a rapidly changing game wasn't to continue pushing but to pull back and find stability from within first.

The process of planning is one of the best ways to recenter yourself. It is a time-out. It is an opportunity to step out of the chaos of ongoing, external change and find stability in your own presence.  

We will see many companies go out of business in the next year. We will hear a lot about the economy and the impact it had. But what nobody wants to admit is that it isn't truly about the economy (which furthermore seems to be growing for a certain subset of consumers that most people on this newsletter serve).

What will truly be the culprit is the fact that most founders failed to plan when times were looking good. Most assumed that things were going the way they would go. That the way they worked as entrepreneurs would be how they needed to work in the future. That the culture that got them here would get them there. That the magic bullets of the 2010s would serve as functional-long term strategies. None of this proved to be true.

When we fail to see that one of our responsibilities as leaders is to navigate change, we miss our opportunity to act before it is needed. The irony of Logan's line is that he failed to act before the biggest change of all—succession. 

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