There is only one possible topic for any Holiday letter, and it is optimism.

We are naturally looking ahead to another orbit around our G-type star, after the winter solstice, perihelion, Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday, and the other seasonal events we celebrate.  Nor do we  want to bore others or remind ourselves about how entropy is catching up with us individually.   So, we will be optimistic and talk about how we as leaders need to be optimistic.

This topic is pretty easy to write about this year.  The technology we use and implement is getting better, safer and easier to use every day.  We are being freed up to work on some of the more difficult problems we face as a profession, and it seems like we are rising to the occasion as a Profession.    We are blessed with an abundance of new knowledge, coupled with our ambition to make our professional and personal lives better.

Sound overly optimistic? Maybe, especially as optimism bias is a well-known cause of bad decisions.

But then there’s this conundrum: With optimism we might fail, but without it we never try anything difficult. And there’s this: As a general rule those pesky human beings who can aggravate us to the nth degree will either live up to our expectations or down to them. So as leaders, if we want our teams to accomplish great things, we owe them our clear expectation that they’re fully capable of achieving what we ask of them.

As leaders, as we focus on the challenges with our teams, optimism is a key tool for managing these challenges toward a better resolution.   Taking the optimistic approach towards challenges may be the part that we want to work on as a conscious choice.

Much of how we each build our own style of leadership is based on what we have experienced when we have been led by others. Leaders, like parents, either lead as they’ve been led because they admired the style when they experienced it, or they lead in a style that’s a diametric opposite to how past leaders treated them poorly and ineffectively.

We can probably all put together rosters in our heads of effective, optimistic leaders, as well as lists of effective (or not) pessimistic or negative leaders.

From a purely utilitarian approach, both approaches can be effective in meeting challenges—but the Optimistic leadership style seems better suited for creating long term solutions.

Building on this more, a mentor of mine once asked me to create a list of the people that I admired the most, and then write down the leadership tool that I can take from each person on the list.  Optimistic problem solving came out as one of the key points that worked for all of them.

So, consider this card to be our encouragement. Your teams need you, but they particularly need your optimism.  What you will get in return is the best version of your team and a better version of yourself, giving you reasons to be optimistic about the upcoming year.

Happy Holidays to you and your teams, from Greg and Bob. See you in 2025.

The more AI you have the less leadership you need.

This might not be obvious, but it is self-evident. Management is about orchestrating the collection of skills the organization needs to get work out the door. Leadership is about getting people to follow the leader’s lead.

So when it comes to keeping a joint running, management is essential regardless of how little or much automation management brings to bear. Leadership is a management capability that’s only essential in proportion to the number of human beings management brings to bear. It’s irrelevant to automation because no matter how skilled IT becomes at Turning’s “Imitation Game,” none of the “eight tasks of leadership” will improve how well your AIs perform.

Automation doesn’t respond to leadership, on top of which it scales better.

That’s why, in the entertainment industry, the most popular actors and directors are paid so much: the cast and crew of a single movie replace dozens or even hundreds of actors who would otherwise read from the same script and roles but on different stages around the world.

Not that they’d be delivering identical performances, as anyone knows who has watched Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Even when the task is as familiar as performing Shakespeare, when different human beings take on the tasks of delivering a movie, changing even one performer results in a new and different work.

With the exception of the entertainment industry, though, and perhaps professional athletics, few businesses are built on a model in which each process output and generated product is supposed to be unique.

In a typical business, where uniqueness isn’t a virtue, a single automaton might displace a large number of human beings who have been responsible for executing the same task. Industrial robots and customer service chatbots are examples.

Other times, an automaton displaces a single human performer, as might be the case for a human researcher whose employer decides to place its trust in Copilot or Gemini instead of a human specialist.

Regardless, a little-explored subject as businesses bring in AI technology is its impact on the executive skillset. That’s a risky oversight, because in traditional businesses the best executives are those with exemplary leadership skills, but in AI-enabled enterprises leadership matters little – it’s the managerial skillset that delivers the goods.

Usually, when the subject turns to business processes it centers on the major process design methodologies – lean, six sigma, lean/six sigma, the theory of constraints, and re-engineering. And to be sure, these methodologies provide useful tools for designing efficient processes.

What sometimes gets lost in the shuffle is process management – the day-to-day slog of making sure management’s elegant new processes are doing what they’re supposed to do.

This will entail more than defining metrics and crafting the systems needed to collect, compute, and review them.

But that will be a good start.