Ah, 2025: a year in which almost everyone became fluent in "leadership" as a noun, and strangely incoherent when practising it as a verb. In my own small corner of the internet, the year's output came to roughly 44 pieces—about 73,000 words—circling a familiar cluster of preoccupations: how authority is gained (and lost), why language matters more than most executives admit, what coherence looks like when you stop mistaking it for "vision", and how organisations quietly rot—not with spectacular scandals, but through silence in organisational behaviour, managerial theatre, and the slow replacement of judgement with process.
If I had to name the governing mood of 2025, it was this: a growing suspicion that many institutions are simultaneously over-managed and under-led. The paperwork is immaculate; the thinking is not. The dashboards glow; the decisions wobble. As I heard form manager after manager I spoke with: organisational progress is less often obstructed by a lack of information than by a lack of clarity about who is authorised to decide, on what grounds, and with what consequences.
The Year's Recurring Argument: Leadership is Reasoned Authority, not Managerial Performance
One thread ran through the year like a steel wire: the distinction between authority and managerialism. In the best cases, authority is granted because the leader can make the case—logically, ethically, and with the relevant knowledge close at hand. In the worst cases, "authority" is merely institutional power wearing a polite lanyard.
This is not just a rhetorical preference for debate-club manners. Spillane and Joullié's critique of managerialism helps explain why so many organisations feel busy yet brittle: managerialism tends to conceal conflict, avoid rational argumentation, and substitute emotive performance for critical evaluation—precisely because genuine debate is unpredictable, and unpredictability is the enemy of those who justify themselves as "scientific managers" of human affairs. The result is a work culture in which meetings become cathartic performances and decisions become the "lowest common denominator" of what can be said without offence. When debate is replaced by atmosphere, authority cannot be earned—only asserted.
That critique connects neatly to another preoccupation of 2025: language as executive work. Executive effectiveness depends on autonomy of judgement and responsible decision-making, and in that process language is not an accessory but central pillar to that function—executive work is essentially declarative. To be effective, managers draw on a hierarchy of language functions—expressive, descriptive, and argumentative—where the giving of reasons matters, not merely the expression of feelings. Put plainly: managers that cannot speak in reasons will eventually attempt to lead by ritual.
This is why, across the year, I kept returning to the same unfashionable point: the health of an organisation is visible in its arguments. Not the shouting kind—the disciplined kind. Where do disagreements go? How are they tested? Who is allowed to challenge whom, and on what evidence? Which conversations are "safe" precisely because they are inconsequential?
Dr Robert N. Winter
Coherence over "vision": the Strategic virtue of not Lying to Yourself
The second major theme was strategy—specifically, a critique of the modern corporate addiction to "vision" language. Too often, vision statements function as decorative theology: a shared creed that offends nobody and changes nothing. In contrast, coherence is costly. It forces trade-offs. It constrains what you can plausibly claim to care about.
The case I kept making in 2025 was straightforward: coherence matters more than vision because strategic success comes from consistent choices—across goals, behaviour, and priorities—rather than from eloquent aspiration and chaotic choices. Vision can be churned out by AI; coherence can only be earned from repeated good choices.
This theme was sharpened through a related argument: the "blank slate" approach to organisational management. When a culture defaults to blame, defensiveness, and inherited dysfunction, you will not repair it by polishing slogans. You need a deliberate reset: clear accountabilities, the removal of performative activity, and a willingness to name the actual work and who is accountable. The blank slate idea was less "burn it down" than "stop pretending the current shape is inevitable".
Ownership is the Extent to Which a Person Follows Up, or 'owns', the Responsibility Discharged.
Accountability Takes Responsibility and Ownership from 'me' to 'we'.
Here, Michael Porter remains the corrective many executives claim to have read but few appear to have absorbed. Porter's central insistence—that strategy is the discipline of defining a position, making trade-offs, and forging fit among activities—functions as an antidote to the modern drift into "operational effectiveness dressed up as strategy". Strategy is as much about choosing what not to do as it is about doing more, faster, and with higher EBIT. In a year saturated with corporate performance, coherence was my preferred way of speaking about honesty.
Dr Robert N. Winter
Reward, Talent, and the Quiet Moral Hazards of "nice" Systems
Several pieces this year circled performance, reward, and the moral confusion introduced by well-intentioned people.
One example: the argument about rewarding effort and learning. The point was not that effort is meaningless—effort is indispensable—but that unexamined "effort-first" reward systems can unintentionally incentivise mediocrity, entitlement, and performative striving. When effort becomes the prize, you can end up rewarding people for activity that never achieves impact. In other words, someone with a growth mindset is not the same as someone who merely engages with rituals of participation. This is one of the places where executive judgement remains irreplaceable: you must reward improvement and require standards.
Likewise, the year returned to the difficulty of identifying potential: the common error of mistaking confidence, polish, or pedigree for future performance. It is easier to reward the socially legible candidate than the quietly competent one; easier to hire the stacked CV than the person whose capabilities have not yet been given room. That is not merely a talent issue; it is a leadership issue, because it reveals what a culture actually values when nobody is watching.
Dr Robert N. Winter
Attention as Strategy: Writing, Reading, and the Discipline of Exclusion
If 2024 was the year of noise, 2025 was the year of fatigue. The temptation was to consume more information as a hedge against uncertainty, and to replace thinking with scanning.
Two paired arguments mattered here. First: better writing improves credibility. Not because prose is a party trick—special pleading on my part—but because writing reveals whether you have actually thought. Clear writing forces you to define terms, expose assumptions, and decide what you mean. It also reduces organisational ambiguity—the breeding ground of politics and misinterpretation.
Second: the art of not reading. In a world of industrial-scale content production, attention becomes a strategic resource. The discipline is not merely choosing what to read, but refusing the endless churn of transient commentary, in order to return to first-order sources and durable arguments. The considered decision not to read isn't a rejection of learning but a commitment to doing it better. The point is not monkish withdrawal. It is executive triage: decide which inputs deserve the privilege of shaping your judgement.
This theme also served as a subtle critique of AI-era knowledge work. When generation becomes cheap, discernment becomes expensive. The executive advantage shifts from producing words to evaluating them—testing claims, tracing sources, and resisting the seduction of fluent nonsense.
Dr Robert N. Winter
Trust, Proxy Trust, and the next Institutional Test
Late in the year, the trust question became harder to avoid. Not "trust" as a generic virtue, but trust as an institutional mechanism. That which what makes coordination possible when certainty is low.
A key concept here was proxy trust: trusting the machine because you trust the institution behind it—outsourcing trust to systems rather than people. The danger is not simply technical error; it is the slow erosion of interpersonal trust and accountable authority. If you rely on institutional proxies to decide what is true, you can end up with an organisation that is simultaneously confident and ungrounded.
This matters because the wider environment is increasingly hostile to authenticity. The World Economic Forum has placed misinformation and disinformation among the most severe short-term global risks, precisely because a society that cannot reliably distinguish truth from fabrication struggles to coordinate—politically, economically, and organisationally. If your staff cannot tell what is real, your strategy becomes theatre.
At this point, it helps to remember Cicero's bluntness: the foundation of justice is good faith. Sadly this concept has been devalued by too many account executives using it in place of a well written contract. Yet, we would do well to resuscitate the concept because good faith is the precondition for commerce, contract, and cooperation. Lose it, and you get surveillance, bureaucracy, and fear—expensive substitutes for trust.
Dr Robert N. Winter
Looking Ahead: 2026, Here We Come
Predictions are often just anxieties in a tuxedo, but a year-in-review earns its keep only if it leads to sharper choices. So here are my high-level strategic projections for 2026.
