Leadership Memo 2025-1
The world is moving at a frantic pace, and you may feel the pressure of staying one step ahead. Or maybe just keeping up. Perhaps you’re trying to make sense of your life and add a little meaning to each day. While it may feel like you’re being pulled along by your circumstances, you’re actually the one who decides what you allow to drive your life. Everyone is driven by something.
The word drive means to guide, control or direct. For instance, if you drive a nail into wood with a hammer, you guide, control and direct the nail into the wood. If you drive a car, you guide, control and direct the car down the street.
What’s driving you?
Right now, you may be driven by a problem, a pressure, or a deadline. Or perhaps you’re driven by guilt, resentment, fear, materialism, or the need for approval. There are hundreds of circumstances, values, and emotions that can drive your life, and every one of them makes you weary.
Maybe you’re driven by current events, looking for meaning in things that will not last. You feel the tension of a polarized society and rapidly advancing technology, and you’ve taken on an emotional load that you were never meant to carry.
There are countless forces that can drive your life, but all lead to the same end: unused potential, unnecessary stress, and an unfulfilled life.
You need a purpose greater than yourself to drive your life.
Nothing can compensate for travelling through life without knowing your WHY. Not success, wealth, fame, or pleasure. Without purpose, your life will always feel like motion without meaning, activity without direction.
When you have no clear purpose, you have no roadmap to help guide your decisions, allocate your time, and manage your resources. You’ll keep changing directions, jobs, or relationships, hoping each change will settle the confusion or fill the emptiness in your heart.
Your WHY shapes every aspect of your life, including how you lead, collaborate, and shape the environments around you at work.
Without purpose, meetings become just another force pulling at your time and energy. They morph into monsters that devour productivity and drain motivation. This is exactly why I wrote Slay the Meeting Monster: Get Rid of Meetings and Get More Done. It’s a practical guide to transforming meeting culture and reclaiming your time and energy for what truly matters.
I’m excited to invite you to our upcoming “Monster-slaying Notes” session – a special book review and AMA (Ask Me Anything). Together, we’ll explore strategies to transform your meeting culture, foster meaningful, purpose-driven collaborations and reclaim your time.
Register now and join me to reimagine the way we connect, collaborate and lead in 2025!
Latest happenings:
We’re kicking off 2025 with an electrifying virtual session at SFBABAM (San Francisco Bay Area Business Agility Meetup)! By popular demand, Joe Justice is back to share the incredible story of how his Agile Lean Startup, Team WIKISPEED, transformed from an all-volunteer initiative into the largest EV race team in Japan—and how they’re dominating the track with Agile hardware. Join us and RSVP now!
When: 14 Jan 5:30pm PST, 8:30pm EST | 15 Jan 01:30 GMT, 12:30pm AEDT, 2:30pm NZDT
