Welcome back to another spin around the sun for 2025!
I hope the festive break has recharged your batteries, Uncle Fester behaved himself and your family celebrations didn’t do any lasting damage!
I was pondering my own re-entry into the New Year orbit when I was, once again, stopped in my tracks by the timely, clear common sense of Tom Goodwin.
He wrote “New Year’s resolutions often feel a bit daft—probably because real change isn’t about bold leaps or grand declarations. It’s about small, continuous shifts. The quiet magic of compound interest applied to our habits, not dramatic overnight pivots.“
The Aggregation of Marginal Gains . . . .
This idea may not be as seductive as that of “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”, Grand Strategies or Bold Visions of the Future . . .
But it works . .
The Magic of Small, Continuous Shifts
Time and time again . .
100 Day Plans not 5 Year Strategies . . .
The “Magic of Small, Continuous Shifts” can sometimes seem like “invisible progress” to start with, as in starting a healthy eating or running regime. . This reflects the “Growth Paradox”. In nature, for example, bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years of its life as it builds extensive root systems underground. Then it explodes ninety feet into the air within six weeks.
So, on this subject of incremental progress, I was further delighted to read of a solution to the corporate nightmare that is the budgeting process. What better time to solve THAT problem when you are only just recovering from the last few months “immersion” in it! 😉
Bayer’s CEO, Bill Anderson, sees budgets as the worst of corporate bureaucracy and decided to turn the process on its head.
“We all know that the belly of the beast of bureaucracy is the budget process, right? Everybody knows that. Everyone hates it.”
Bill has eliminated the endless “crystal ball gazing” process of budgeting and target setting, and instead requires teams to come together every 90 days to discuss whether the company achieved its goals, how it used resources, and what it needs to focus on next.
The conventional annual budget process, Anderson said, is “a waste of time”.
I have always struggled with this idea that we can predict the future of a business even 4 or 5 quarters out.
“So, every 90 days people can flow between teams, money can flow between teams,” Anderson said. “And you’re working on the most important things for the next 90 days.”
Feels like the Magic of Small, Continuous Shifts to me.
I’m all in.
Finally, there is a universal scale example of “small, continuous shifts” creating some celestial magic right now, in the latest iteration of a repeated 80 year cycle.
T Corona Borealis, also known as T Cor Bor and “The Blaze Star”, is a tiny white dwarf star orbiting a much bigger star and slowly sucking matter from its companion to create a flammable blanket of gas that will ignite in a massive flash 3,000 light years away.
But quite soon . . . .
The resulting blast, that last occurred in 1946, will be visible with the naked eye and will be roughly as bright as Polaris, the “North Star”.
Keep your eyes peeled!
Happy New Year and Best Wishes to you and yours for 2025.
You can read Tom Goodwin’s post on ” quiet magic of compound interest applied to our habits” here . . . He also discusses scarcity and abundance and their relationship to human evolution and why it’s hurting us today.
You can read about the “Growth Paradox” (and 15 other strange but beautiful paradoxes) here . . .
And, you can read about the amazing phenomenon of T Cor Bor here . . .
Thanks for reading.
Happy New Year !