DECEMBER 2024

Cheers to a Year of Learning & Growing With You

Dear friend,

As the world changes, the best businesses change with it. 

They venture into new topics and terrains without losing sight of the truths and priorities that always underpin the world's great organizations. 

Great organizations find alignment between strategy, structure and culture.They have leaders who cultivate trust, and who inspire and empower people to do their best work. And they maintain an eye toward the future — they know that transformation is an ongoing, essential business imperative, and one that only succeeds when it's approached as a human-centered discipline. 

It’s been a joy to learn, grow and think alongside you this year. From all of us at Gagen MacDonald, happy holidays!

IN THIS ISSUE

Favorite Insights from 2024

Love in Business – By the Numbers

Each Valentine’s Day, we take a moment to honor a core belief that has guided our firm for the past 26 years: Love in Business is Good Business™. The essence of this idea has always been that treating people well is not just the right thing to do; it also drives business results. This year, we decided to look at the ROI of Love in Business by the numbers. 

Three Best Practices for Communicating With Employees Through a Contested Merger

When dealing with the uncertainty of a contested merger, the importance of frequent, intentional leadership communication only grows. Senior Director Michelle Therrien provides three pieces of advice for how to lead and what to prioritize when communicating with employees through these murky situations.

Seeing the Same Field: Drawing From Tom Brady’s Playbook to Drive AI Adoption

As businesses plan for AI adoption and other ambitious technology-driven transformation initiatives, Maril believes they can learn a lot from the great quarterback about strategy execution. 

The Four-Day Workweek: What Businesses Should Be Thinking About

Senior Directors Courtney O'Connell and William Pierce examine the different business factors, downstream impacts and working models leaders should consider as they assess a four-day workweek's viability for their businesses.

Harmonizing Cultures: The Art of Post-Merger Integration with Umayma Abubakar (podcast)

In a world where so many M&A activities fail to deliver their promised results, Umayma has firsthand knowledge of how to buck the trend, and truly create something new and better through all the change.

What Chick-fil-A Has Figured Out About Leadership with Mark Miller (podcast)

At the heart of Chick-fil-A’s iconic culture is a simple but consistent focus on studying and developing good leaders. Rising from an hourly employee at a local branch to a member of the executive team, Mark was there as the company first began to study what it takes to be an effective leader. 

In February of this year, we released our annual white paper predicting priorities for 2024. We followed up the paper with a webinar series featuring the experts to dive more deeply into the topics and discuss how smart leaders are putting them into practice. Each conversation was a live webinar, hosted by our CEO and founder Maril MacDonald. You can access all the recordings from the series here. 

Be on the lookout for our 2025 Priorities white paper early next year!