"I am rooted, but I flow." ~ Virgina Woolf
Photo Credit: Rosemary Jordan, Alameda, CA, November 2025
Greetings -
I hope you and your families are well and enjoying the start of the holiday season. It is hard (or maybe not :)) to believe that this year is quickly giving way to the next. I wish you a graceful close to 2025 and a great start, professionally and personally, in 2026.
I am including the reading and listening that most influenced my perspective, curated from the year's editions. I welcome your suggestions as well, so please feel free to drop me a line. (At the end of this newsletter, there are links to posts from the past two years with reading and listening that has and continues to speak to me. Enjoy!)
This will be my last publication for 2025. I will resume in January, after an extended period of reflecting and recharging with family and friends. We are especially looking forward to visiting with our daughter over the coming weeks.
I would like to recognize and thank each of you for your support, partnership and, in many cases, business. I deeply appreciate you sharing your journey with me and being an integral part of mine! I wish you, your families and friends a happy and gratitude-filled holiday season! Safe and expeditious travels for those of you on the move over the next few weeks.
As always, happy reading and listening!
Be well, take good care of your families and community.
-kj
PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)
Reflections
"Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need." ~ Kahlil Gibran
“This is the urgency: Live! And have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind."~ Gwendolyn Brooks
"I slept, and dreamed that life was joy;
I woke, and found that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy."
~ Ellen Sturgis
Articles
Harvard Business Review: The Success-Then-Happiness Fallacy. "Whether you are an employee or employer, it is a better investment to increase happiness at work and in life, rather than simply trying to increase measures of success."
Harvard Business Review: Who Are You as a Leader? "Social scientists have recently developed a new appreciation for how your conception of yourself can affect your professional and personal lives. The good news is that recent research has shown that you can curate your identity in the workplace in ways that will improve your performance as a leader, the trust you’re able to inspire in others, and even your overall well-being...At the center of this approach is the construction of what Ingram calls the identity map—a simple device that allows people to identify, visualize, and ultimately leverage the many interconnected elements that make up their sense of who they are."
Harvard Business Review: Leaders Shouldn’t Try to Do It All. "Many important tasks can be done by other people. Focus on what you can do a lot better than anyone else."
Harvard Business Review: The Conflict-Intelligent Leader. "In these turbulent times learning how to manage disputes is a must."
McKinsey & Company: The art of 21st-century Leadership: From Succession Planning To Building a Leadership Factory. "Increasingly, our research and experience in the field suggest that organizations need to shift their leadership approaches in several core areas. Instead of managing with an eye solely on profits and preservation, leaders must also think about how to convey vision and possibilities (innovation) to all stakeholders. Instead of looking at value creation through the lens of scarcity and capitalizing on existing assets, leaders must consider opportunities to co-create with partners. Rather than simply command and control, leaders must collaborate and coach. And authenticity among leaders isn’t just nice to have; it’s expected by employees, customers, and almost everyone along the value chain."
McKinsey & Company: A new operating model for people management: More personal, more tech, more human. "Organizations are just at the start of a massive transformation in people management—but the time to act is now, as people functions will play a critical role in helping them navigate a more complex and uncertain future. Over the next decade, they must take significant strides toward a value-driven, human-centered, and tech-enabled approach to people management. This will mean overhauling the people operating system to be simpler, more strategic, and more fluid than it is now. Such a transformation will boost organizational effectiveness as well as employee engagement and productivity. Regardless of their starting point, organizations should embrace the opportunities in adopting this powerful new people management model and use it to create value for the business."
Harvard Business Review: New Research on the Link Between Learning and Innovation. "Innovation thrives not through increased effort, but through smarter, more structured effort. Clearly sequencing and distinguishing your team’s learning activities—reflection, exploration, and refinement—turns potential chaos into strategic clarity, unlocking better decision-making and sustained innovation."
Harvard Business Review: How To Give Busy People Time To Innovate. "Most companies are full of really busy people, which makes it hard to slow down and focus on trying new things. At the same time, stopping everything to focus on innovation can leave day-to-day tasks neglected. So, how can leaders make sure workers are able to balance operational necessities with innovation? Four strategies can help: 1) Clearing the “process debt” that’s blocking innovation time; 2) Subtracting something old before you add something new; 3) Putting innovation at the top of the list; and 4) Separate invention and optimization."
Harvard Business Review: Highly Skilled Professionals Want Your Work But Not Your Job. "Freelancers are in huge demand today, and they know it. It’s time for new rules of engagement."
The Wall Street Journal: Landing a Job Is All About Who You Know (Again). "Networking is making a comeback as employers drown in computer-generated job applications." [KJ - I don't buy that networking ever went away; it is integral to success in the modern workplace.]
Forbes: The #1 Skill That Pays More Than Gen AI In 2025. "The number one skill you need in 2025 is communication...But not just any kind of communication. You need creative communication. To put it simply, you can’t use gen AI as a crutch for your lack of communication skills or creative thinking. AI skills are there to act as assistants, to augment your work. You can use it for brainstorming assistance, content ideas, even content structuring and to help you draft an outline or sample draft."
KelloggInsight: Take 5: Feeling Stuck? Try a Career Makeover. "Regardless of where you are in your career, it can be challenging to figure out the next move. Whether you’re looking for a big swerve or just feel stalled in your current role, the choices you make may very well dictate your trajectory for years to come. So, it’s often well worth your while to consider how best to approach the process."
The Cut: 7 Stories of Dramatic Career Pivots. "At some point, everybody dreams of quitting their job to do something completely different. Sometimes, those dreams fall under pure fantasy. At other times, they’re grounded in reality and hope. In the spirit of such hope, we found seven people whose major career changes worked out astoundingly well — both financially and emotionally."
Harvard Business Review: The Power of Mattering at Work. "...Many employees don’t feel that they matter to their employers, bosses, and colleagues. Mattering—a mainstay concept in psychology—is the experience of feeling significant to those around us because we feel valued and know that we add value...[What should leaders do?] First, leaders need to truly see and hear team members during daily interactions. They must also regularly affirm their people’s significance. And finally, senior leaders need to scale these skills up to the organizational level so that mattering becomes a cultural norm. These behaviors may seem like common sense, but they’ve ceased to be common practice in a world of brief digital communications and condescension toward soft skills, and they’re well worth relearning."
Harvard Business Review: What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety: Six misconceptions that have led organizations astray. "Timely input, candid feedback, and robust debate are as vital for ensuring innovation as for preventing strategic blunders. Leaders who create the kinds of teams that practice these ways of interacting will be poised to outperform those who do not. Ultimately, psychological safety is about changing the expectations for how we work together to successfully navigate the storms ahead."
Harvard Business Review: What People Still Get Wrong About Negotiations. "They assume the size of the pie is fixed—and miss opportunities to create value." [KJ: For an excellent companion perspective from a former hostage negotiator, see Scott Walker's HBR article delineating his approaches to effective negotiation.]
Harvard Business Review: The Right Way to Prepare for a High-Stakes Conversation. "Curiosity is a choice, and that choice begins before you speak your first word. By honestly assessing where you sit on the Curiosity Curve, setting realistic intentions to move toward greater openness, and deploying targeted Curiosity Sparks, you can transform your most challenging interactions from battles to be won into opportunities for mutual discovery and collaborative problem-solving."
Harvard Business Review: What Needs to Change About DEI — and What Doesn’t. "...It’s good-faith criticism that reflects many people’s enduring belief that their workplaces and industries can and should be better for everyone in them. That our DEI work itself can and should be better at creating change, ensuring accountability, and building bridges between communities rather than polarizing them." [KJ: Additional research and analysis re: the attributes and success metrics of the most inclusive leaders can be found here: HBR: What Makes an Inclusive Leader?]
Chief Executive: Alan Mulally On The Power Of Transparency. "At a recent CEO gathering, Mulally shared his insights on leadership, culture and decision-making. His message was clear: success comes from collaboration, transparency and a relentless focus on serving all stakeholders, not just shareholders."
Harvard Business Review: Why “Wisdom Work” Is the New “Knowledge Work.” "Valuing human wisdom provides the ideal workplace balance to the rise of artificial intelligence. Although anybody who effectively distills life experiences can be wise, the more life lessons we've navigated, the more raw material for wisdom we possess. It's time that we invest as much energy in helping older workers distill their wisdom as we do in helping younger workers accumulate their knowledge."
Harvard Business Review: How Gen AI Could Change the Value of Expertise. "In the near future, gen AI is likely to affect some 50 million jobs, automating away elements of some jobs and augmenting workers’ abilities in others. The extent of those changes will compel companies to reshape their organizational structures and rethink their talent management strategies in profound ways, with implications that will affect not only for industries but also individuals and society. Critically, traditional learning curves for jobs will be redrawn, creating new paradigms for skill acquisition and career advancement. This shift demands a fundamental rethinking of how businesses approach talent management and how individuals navigate their careers."
Harvard Business Review: 5 Critical Skills Leaders Need in the Age of AI. "The bottom line is this: AI will not deliver value simply because firms spend money on tools and infrastructure. It will deliver value when leaders develop the new competencies needed to transform their firms and teams so that they can make full use of the technology’s potential to provide real strategic advantage."
Harvard Business Review: Every Team Needs a Super-Facilitator. Super-facilitators "...are architects of group performance who bring people together optimally. [They] integrate diverse expertise, promote equitable contributions, and cultivate trust. In doing so they generate collective intelligence, or a group’s ability to reason, innovate, and solve problems."
Harvard Business Review: Why You Need Systems Thinking Now. "It’s the best way to anticipate the many secondary effects of change in an interconnected world."
Harvard Business Review: In Turbulent Times, Consider 'Strategic Subtraction.' "In an era when every competitor is racing to add more features, channels, data, and spend, the real differentiator is the courage to remove. Subtraction is neither austerity nor minimalism; it’s strategic design. By carving away the non-essential, leaders create the white space where breakthroughs can grow and position their organizations to be first off-the-blocks when the rebound arrives."
Harvard Business Review: Most Leaders Don't Celebrate Their Wins - But They Should. "When leaders constantly push forward without pausing to recognize progress, they risk burnout, diminished resilience, and poorer judgment...By making progress visible, separating real from self-imposed urgency, and redefining what celebration looks like, leaders can strengthen confidence, sustain motivation, and stay grounded in what’s working—even amid relentless demands."
Book
Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, by Oliver Burkeman. "Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, ["Meditations for Mortals"] offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls ‘imperfectionism’. How can we embrace our non-negotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? What if purposeful productivity were often about letting things happen, not making them happen? Reflecting on ideas drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores practical tools and shifts in perspective. The result is a bracing challenge to much familiar advice, and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully."
Blog Posts & Opinions
Behavioral Scientist: A New Philosophy of Productivity. "The problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition that has taken hold in recent decades. Here’s what should replace it."
Psychology Today: How to Say No and Mean It: A No must be true No, and a Yes must be a Hell, Yes. "The world demands our compliance every day, in ways both large and small. But we owe obedience to no one, and when our values would be compromised by consent, defiance must be our response. Research shows us why saying no can be so important for our mental health and points to the best ways to stick to our principles."
Michael Watkins: Seven Strategies for Building Your Career in a Connected World. "The advice I received years ago – 'It’s not who you know, but who knows you' – remains a cornerstone of my career success, even today...By developing your skills, contributing meaningfully, and cultivating visibility, relationships, and collaboration, you can ensure the right people are eager to help you succeed."
Freethink: Kevin Kelly points a new way forward into the Age of AI. "One of the most original and optimistic thinkers in America helps build out some big through lines on what's possible with AI in the next 25 years."
LinkedIn: Michael Watkins: The Six Disciplines of Strategic Negotiation... and How to Use AI to Support Them. "...By focusing on the six core disciplines—[of strategic negotiation] pattern recognition, systems analysis, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy—negotiators can develop a comprehensive skill set that prepares them for even the most challenging scenarios...By leveraging AI tools judiciously, negotiators can augment their skills, gain deeper insights, and prepare more thoroughly for diverse negotiation contexts."
The New York Times: David Brooks: You Are Only as Smart as Your Emotions. "We now understand that our emotions are often wise. The problem is that our culture and our institutions haven’t caught up with our knowledge."
The New York Times: Adam Grant: No, You Don’t Get an A for Effort. "The problem is that we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic...The true measure of learning is not the time and energy you put in. It’s the knowledge and skills you take out."
Big Think: When to quit: A simple framework for life’s toughest decisions. "Annie Duke, a poker champion turned decision scientist, talks with Big Think about how to choose well under uncertainty."
Seth's Blog: Choose Your Fuel Wisely. "We thrive when we find a goal and a metric that’s resilient and easily replenished. It turns out that making a contribution is something we can do, again and again, and it never gets old."
Aeon: The unseen. "Our crisis of work and technology is one in which too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being."
Paul Graham: The Right Kind of Stubborn. "But is there any real difference between these [persistence and obstinacy] two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not?"
Chief Executive: I Advocate For Women. But I’ve Been Hardest On Them. "We talk a lot about the external barriers women face—pay gaps, underrepresentation, outdated policies. But rarely do we talk about the internal ones: the judgment we pass without noticing, the expectations we’ve inherited and never questioned and the quiet ways we hold each other back."
Seth's Blog: Bringing goodwill to the conversation. "Learning is an argument, a conversation designed to change minds. Learning happens long after we leave organized schooling, and it requires emotional enrollment. We’re more likely to learn when we bring a desire to be transformed and to leave our previous assumptions behind."
Podcasts & TED Talks
HBR IdeaCast: Employment Is Changing Forever. "As organizations and workers face a new wave of technological change, Deborah Perry Piscione argues that we're at a pivot point where old models of employment will be replaced by entirely new ones. Get ready for GenAI-assisted, decentralized, sometimes autonomous workforces, and “jobs” that span gigs, companies, industries, geographies, and the metaverse."
The Ezra Klein Show: Burned Out? Start Here. "...Burkeman’s big idea, which he also explores in his best seller “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,” is that the desire to be more productive, to squeeze out the most from each day, to try to feel on top of our lives, is ultimately insatiable. He argues that addressing burnout requires a shift in outlook — accepting that our time and energy are finite, and that there will always be something more to do. In other words: What if you began with a deeper appreciation of your own limits? How, then, would you live?"
People I (Mostly) Admire: Pay Attention! (Your Body Will Thank You). "Ellen Langer is a psychologist at Harvard who studies the mind-body connection. She’s published some of the most remarkable scientific findings [on the interaction of our minds and bodies]. Can we really improve our physical health by changing our mind?"
TED Radio Hour: The Hidden Role of Friction in Our Lives. "We encounter friction every day — in all its forms — as we brush our teeth, go for a jog, argue with a friend. This hour, TED speakers explore how this force can be dialed up or down to improve our lives."
Hidden Brain: When To Pivot. "When should you stay the course in life, and when should you shift with changing tides? This [episode explores] case studies from the world of business to explore the science of inflection points — changes that dramatically transform the course of events. Researcher Rita McGrath of Columbia University explains why we fail to see impending moments of upheaval, and what we can do to be more adept at spotting them."
The TED Radio Hour: Soundtracks of our lives. "From our favorite songs to our own voices, we're surrounded by sound all day. But how does all this noise affect our emotions and behavior?"
McKinsey & Company: Author Talks: Shankar Vedantam on the power and paradox of self-deception. "The host of Hidden Brain on NPR discusses the lies we all tell ourselves and the role they play in easing everyday life."
WorkLife with Adam Grant: Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of self-correction. "[Malcolm] and Adam riff on the value of acknowledging our past mistakes, strategies for coping with failure and ways to avoid the traps of homogeneous cultures."
The Ezra Klein Show: How the Attention Economy Is Devouring Gen Z — and the Rest of Us. "Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani are both proof of how the ability to capture attention is power. And the attention economy isn’t reshaping just politics; it’s also reshaping the actual economy: the crypto market, A.I. venture capital, and how people, especially Gen Z, are making career decisions. Kyla Scanlon has emerged as a leading theorist on the economics of attention and is herself a member of Gen Z...I asked her on the show to walk us through her theory of the attention economy."
Worklife With Adam Grant: Generational differences are vastly exaggerated. "There are 5 different generations in the workplace today, and strong views can lead to conflict between age groups. But are generational differences really the problem? In this episode, Adam investigates the root causes of age stereotypes, why they hold us all back, and how to overcome generational divides at work." [KJ: Here is a short, follow-up podcast - "Office Hours with Adam: Bridging generational divides" - that looks at: 1) the misuse and impact of psychological safety; 2) how to brainstorm productive ways to counter negative stereotypes about Gen Z; and 3) strategies for bridging communication gaps across generations.]
The Tim Ferriss Show: Master Negotiator William Ury — Proven Strategies and Amazing Stories from Warren Buffett, Nelson Mandela, Kim Jong Un, Hugo Chávez, and More. "William Ury, cofounder of Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, is one of the world’s best-known experts on negotiation. He is coauthor of Getting to Yes, the all-time best selling negotiation book in the world. He is also the author of Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations and Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict."
Simon Sinek's A Bit of Optimism: Thinking About Thinking with Brené Brown and Adam Grant, Parts 1 and 2. "To become more self-aware, sometimes you need a friend. Two friends is even better...[In Part 1, we discuss] knowing ourselves and how self-reflection is sometimes best done with others...[In Part 2], we discuss identifying our values, the two types of narcissists, explanation-based parenting, and exercising judgment over our own judgment."
Hidden Brain: How Our Brains Learn. "Have you ever fallen asleep in school or during a work meeting? Maybe you felt your eyes glaze over as your boss or a teacher droned on and on about a topic that had no relevance to you. What's missing from these classrooms and conference rooms is engagement: A state of being absorbed, alert, and eager to learn. This week, psychologist and neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang explores why so many of us feel apathetic at school and at work, and how to cultivate the magic of engagement."
The Ezra Klein Show: Our Lives Are an Endless Series of 'And.' "...We’re in a time when to open the news is to expose yourself to horrors — ones that are a world away, others that are growing ever closer, or perhaps have already made landfall in our lives. And then many of us look up from our screens into a normal spring day. What do you do with that?...How do we hold all that we have to hold, all at once? How do we not feel overwhelmed, or emotionally numbed?"
TED Radio Hour: How taking a second look can change your everything. "A second glance can change everything...TED speakers will make you think twice about robots, history lessons and even wine bottles."
TED Radio Hour: The Art of Choosing What To Do. "The way we spend our hours defines our lives...TED speakers explore how we make choices about time, meaning and attention in a world of infinite options."
For prior year faves:
2023: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog/2023/12/10/time-keeps-changingrearrangingme-michael-stipe