We had a particularly cold week last week here in the D.C. area–down into the low teens at night and highs in the 20s. That’s not normal for this area, where high temperatures, even in January, average above 40 degrees. Fortunately, I work from home, so there were a couple of days last week where I didn’t even need to venture outside at all. That’s what we do in winter: we hunker down, and retreat to where it’s warm, and get as much work done as we can. It’s hard and not always comfortable, but that’s the work of winter, and deep down we know that spring is coming. We know that we will soon emerge and have our day in the sun (metaphor alert).
When you’re stuck in winter, it’s important to remember that spring is coming. You need that seed of optimism to get you through the hard parts, to keep you moving and working, rather than just giving up. Every year you hit that same point where you want to give up, but you remember that spring is coming, and you put one foot in front of the other.
Society is in the middle of a winter-to-spring transition right now, particularly when it comes to leadership and management. That’s what Maddie and I have written about in our forthcoming book, When Millennials Take Over: Preparing for the Ridiculously Optimistic Future of Business. You’ll obviously be seeing much more about this book in the next two months on this blog, as we gear up for our early March release date.
But I at least wanted to remind everyone that spring is coming. We included the phrase “ridiculously optimistic” in the title very intentionally. We can see the “spring” when it comes to the future of business. We’ve written in the book about the positive deviants that are showing us all how to create more powerful cultures, today. Regardless of what you think about the Millennials, they are moving into positions of power at the same time as a tectonic shift in business, so let’s follow their lead and venture out into the sunshine together.