End of year reviews are good, but personal reflections are even better. They are the feedback we give ourselves, and they are often more instructive, honest, and motivating than anything we could learn in a performance review. Below you’ll find our simple template to reflect on the year that’s passed and plan for the year ahead.  

Here’s the simple truth: We think and work better when we feel both grateful and appreciated. Feeling grateful helps us feel full, like we have resources and options. Feeling appreciated makes us feel worthy and recognized, like what we’re doing matters. 

Today, most entrepreneurs focus the majority of their energy on trying to build bigger sails while never considering all of the invisible forces that might be holding them back. It’s never been easier to start a company, and there are more tools and money available to grow a startup faster today than ever before. But still, why is it so hard? Why do so many companies flame out? 

The answer is friction, or what we like to call “Undercurrents.”

Paul Graham’s post on Founder Mode has certainly struck a nerve. The memes alone have provided days of delight and distraction. But while over-delegating to professional managers can screw things up, the solution is not necessarily to fire them and go back to the inherently unscalable and untenable do-it-all-yourself model. Both of those extremes are failure modes. The true Founder Mode, one that drives high performance at scale, resides somewhere in the middle.

Like Blue Zone Regions that report incredibly high health and happiness rates among their citizens, we call these companies that report high employee well-being and above average business outcomes Blue Zone businesses. 

In this article, we look at the negative consequences of ignoring employee wellbeing, how treating employee wellness and job satisfaction as key business metrics can improve profits, and the five characteristics all Blue Zone Businesses sharel.

A healthy amount of fear activates us and keeps us inventing. However, when fear runs rampant, it can debilitate us, causing increased anxiety and stress. Even when less extreme, our fears can impair our productivity, decision-making, and morale—all things that leaders in particular need on lock. When these elements deteriorate, it takes a toll on our teams and organizations. The kind of toll depends on which specific fear the leader is battling.

If your company is like most companies, there are likely recurring problems that you’re tired of dealing with. Morale might be inconsistent. Performance could be better. People seem stressed and anxious. In all-hands, employees aren’t speaking up like they used to. You don’t feel like you’re innovating fast or well enough anymore. Overall, the vibe is just a little off.

Every company has a culture. And no, we’re not talking about beanbag chairs and kombucha on tap. We’re talking about what you DO to get great work done. Not your plans and OKRs. How you treat each other. How you debate, disagree, and ultimately commit to decisions. Everywhere you look, people talk about the importance of getting culture right, of having good culture, because common sense tells us good culture = a thriving company.

For years, Silicon Valley CEOs and investors have held the simplistic belief that CEOs have two modes: wartime and peacetime. Wartime CEOs take no prisoners and believe sacrifice and loss are central to victory. Peacetime CEOs operate in maintenance mode—coasting along and allowing the team to coast too, without much risk-taking or response to external pressure. In recent years full-time wartime CEOs have garnered attention aplenty, prompting many new founders and CEOs to adopt severe personas, hold unreasonable expectations, and keep their teams operating full steam ahead at all times.

Articles everywhere this month will tell you to express gratitude to your teams, build gratitude into your culture, and give thanks for all you have as leaders and organizations. And that’s all well and good—leaders should do all of these things. But there’s a problem: blithely giving gratitude just to give gratitude doesn’t cut the cranberry sauce because not all gratitude is created equal.

Silicon Valley has been a hotbed of leadership myths since its earliest days. The dot-com boom brought about the rise of the biggest companies of the modern era, and because of their success, the leadership practices of those companies’ founders—no matter how problematic they were—became canonical in American culture. Startup founders became the leaders to follow, and their leadership practices became the practices to emulate. Eventually, those practices and beliefs morphed into a composite myth that goes something like this: A successful startup founder is an untouchable unicorn who has the best ideas and is uniquely responsible for their company’s success; the team just needs to execute their vision.

While having acrimonious, mismanaged conflict is culturally detrimental and costly for organizations, having healthy conflict among colleagues is actually a sign of organizational health. And it’s something leaders and teams need to embrace and pursue rather than back away from if they want to grow and succeed. 

Here are 3 reasons why healthy conflict is good for your teams and organizations:

Believe it or not, as a leader, taking a vacation is part of your job. It’s actually a part of everyone’s job, and it’s critical that leaders model that. While we all know that vacation is important for resting, resetting, and checking in with ourselves and how we’re doing, what leaders often don’t realize is that taking time away from the office also provides an important opportunity to check in on how your company is actually doing.

Is everything going so well that no one noticed you were gone? Or did it turn into Lord of the Flies? 

Here are three warning signs to look out for when you return from vacation—and what to do if you find them happening on your team on (or off) your watch.

“I’ve got all these people complaining about there being too much change at work.” Edward’s client sat wringing his hands. “I don’t see things slowing down anytime soon, so how can I help my team cope with the pace of change?”

This client is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He and his teams are not the only ones wondering how to deal with change these days. With companies across industries going through massive digital transformation (among other big changes), leaders all over have been grappling with this question. These transformations can be seen as disruptive—people feel the change is too much too fast.

It’s Monday morning, and Shannon strides into her company’s office in the Nomad neighborhood of New York City. En route to her desk, she pauses in front of a whiteboard listing out another team’s goals for the quarter. “I need to circle up with Jim about that,” she thinks to herself. She then runs into some colleagues by the coffee machine and falls into an impromptu discussion of an issue highlighted in last week’s all-hands meeting. A few minutes later, as she sits down at her desk, her supervisor remembers a bit of feedback she wanted to share with Shannon about a client interaction on Friday.

There’s been a deafening sense of “meh” in the American workplace for the last few years, and now we are adding to it a feeling of existential dread. Prompted by the pandemic, we moved to increasingly remote work, which while convenient has removed much of the excitement of working on teams, and now AI has arrived, bringing with it a whole host of questions and concerns for leaders and employees alike about our jobs, our value as individuals, and our ability to create and innovate.

It’s completely fair to be both excited and concerned. AI can do a lot But let’s remember, there’s a lot it can’t do, too. 

Often, emerging leaders receive promotions into management roles during regular compensation and promotion cycles, or when a senior leader announces their exit and long-standing succession plans are put into action. 

Other times, change happens quickly and unexpectedly after layoffs, reorgs, or the abrupt departure of a leader who got a great opportunity elsewhere or wants to spend more time with their family. In these instances, instead of getting promoted through traditional advancement processes, one person gets plucked from a team for the empty management role—like a soldier getting a real-time promotion on the battlefield to fill a leadership void.

Reports of layoffs have increased in recent months, and they are likely to continue for some time. Some leaders may believe that the initial challenge of carrying out reductions in force, or RIFs, with care and respect for those being let go is the hardest part, but that’s really just the beginning.

While letting people go with grace is difficult, the more complex challenge leaders face in the aftermath is maintaining an energized and dedicated workforce that feels valued and safe despite losing coworkers and experiencing a wide range of emotions. How can leaders rebuild psychological safety and momentum and actually accelerate out of the curve after a layoff?

The SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) hype is the latest financial engineering offering to quickly hit both mainstream media and the backrooms of Silicon Valley.

Wall Street is now “printing” 15 new SPAC IPOs each week while mainstream media prints 15 articles a week on the subject. Perhaps it’s time to explore the psychological motivations driving SPAC-mania.

I’m not going to cover the architecture or the mechanics of SPACs. The concept is the more familiar “reverse merger” where a public company acquires a more valuable private company to increase the public company’s valuation. With SPACs, the public company is literally a blank-check IPO company and the sole goal is for the acquired private company to become the operating public company.

It’s IPO season. Since June, more than 20 companies have filed S-1s. This includes seven companies filing in one day, on August 24, which is unprecedented. With dozens of CEOs planning to take their companies public, how do we know which ones will pop and which will flop?

In his 2012 book The Founder’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman famously pointed out that 65% of companies that fail, do so over “people issues” as opposed to core business issues. So, as Wall Street analysts pour over the filing documents and make their recommendations based solely on their evaluations of past and projected financial data, we often ask ourselves, “Who is evaluating the CEO?”