"Leadership in 2025: Mastering the contradiction between knowing what's essential and eliminating it." - Futurist Jim Carroll
If anything is real in 2025, it is the fact that organizations have mastered the art of saying one thing and doing another - often with a pretty negative intent.
No wonder people are jaded, confused, wound up, and upset.
Think about it. Organizations worldwide face an existential contradiction: the very investments needed to survive the future are being slashed to survive the present. The goals they set to live up to some pretty vast challenges have been torn asunder or set aside.
And the fact is, this "say-do gap" is everywhere. (That's the gap between what they 'say' they will do, and what they actually 'do.') I used Claude.AI and Google Gemini to do a deep research analysis of what's going on, and both came back with some pretty intense reading. I then used Gamma. App to summarize this into two slide decks - one generic, and one specific.
The first, "The 2025 Paradox Report: 50 Contradictions Between Corporate Rhetoric and Reality", will give you a pretty quick idea of the nature of the gap.
To give just one example from that document:
"Organizations publicly declare workforce development as essential while simultaneously gutting the very programs and people needed to build future capabilities, creating a widening gap between skills rhetoric and investment reality."
I easily came up with 50 such contradictions. Give it a read - it's pretty stark.
The second one gets a little more specific - The Preparedness Paradox: How Organizations Are Cutting the Very Investments They Need to Survive the Future is an even more sobering read.
This one gets into actual corporate stories and observations., I ran the PDF through multiple AI systems for a fact check, and it's pretty spot on.
Consider the major contradiction between the escalating cybersecurity crisis and the slowing budget growth.
The number of breached accounts increased eightfold to 5.5 billion.
The average cost of a data breach rose by 10% to $4.88 million, reaching an all-time high of $9.36 million in the U.S.
The healthcare sector alone saw 276.7 million records exposed.
Despite these worsening threats, the growth of security budgets slowed to only 8% in 2024.
Say-do!
Read the list of 50 contradictions. It's pretty depressing.
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Futurist Jim Carroll believes we are living through the era of 'shallow leadership' - a time when many organizations have lost the very essence of any type of corporate social responsibility. The extent of the damage will be evident in the years to come.
**#Contradiction** **#Leadership** **#Hypocrisy** **#Investment** **#Rhetoric** **#Reality** **#Crisis** **#Paradox** **#Gap** **#Accountability**
Original post: https://jimcarroll.com/2025/10/decoding-tomorrow-daily-inspiration-leadership-in-2025-mastering-the-contradiction-between-knowing-whats-essential-and-eliminating-it/
