Your Company Does Not Need a Resolution. It Needs a Reckoning.

Everyone is making New Year’s resolutions.

Communicate better.
Move faster.
Care more.

None of that fixes a system designed to reward burnout and call it commitment.

Your company does not need a fresh start.
It needs a refusal to keep pretending broken is normal.

This is not a resolution.

It is a reckoning.

Stop Optimizing Broken Systems

If your process requires heroics to succeed, the process is the problem.

Yet every year leaders announce “improvements” that do nothing but rearrange the same broken steps. New templates. New ceremonies. New acronyms that promise clarity and deliver fatigue.

Optimization is only useful when the foundation is sound.

If your teams need constant escalation, late nights, and emotional gymnastics to ship, you are not leading improvement. You are managing damage.

Before you improve anything, ask one uncomfortable question.

Would this system still work if everyone only worked normal hours?

If the answer is no, the system is lying to you.

Fire Your Worst Process

You already know which one it is.

The approval chain that exists only to protect egos.
The status report nobody reads but everyone is afraid to stop sending.
The spreadsheet that gets copied, not trusted.

Kill it.

Do not replace it yet.
Let the absence expose what was never adding value in the first place.

Progress often begins with deletion.

Culture Is What Happens When Things Go Wrong

Pizza is not culture.
Slack emojis are not trust.

Culture is how leadership behaves when production breaks, when a deadline slips, when a developer makes a mistake in front of a room full of executives.

If fear drives behavior, you do not have a culture problem.
You have a leadership problem.

No resolution fixes that. Only courage does.

Burn the Word “Urgent” to the Ground

Urgency is the laziest form of management.

It replaces prioritization.
It hides poor planning.
It turns smart people into reactive messes.

When everything is urgent, nobody learns. Nobody improves. Everyone just survives.

Reckoning means deciding what truly matters and letting everything else wait.

The Reckoning Is Quiet

There will be no launch party.
No slogans.
No transformation roadmap.

It will look like canceled meetings, deleted processes, and leaders saying no more than yes.

That is not rebellion.

That is responsibility.

New year.
New rules.
Burn the rest.