Instead of a universal definition, "real progress" is achieved by first defining what change you want to see in your organization. You then adapt your ways of working—strategy, discovery, OKRs—to support that specific goal, rather than just following a generic playbook.

In a dysfunctional environment, the absence of pushback is a significant warning sign. Humans are highly adaptive; those who can't tolerate the system leave, while those who remain learn to cope. This creates a dangerous silence, where leaders mistakenly believe everything is fine because no one is complaining.

The award intentionally avoids choosing the "best" country (like Finland) or "most consequential" (like America) to prevent repetition and negativity bias. Instead, it focuses on the nation that has improved the most over the year, creating a more dynamic and interesting evaluation framework applicable to any performance review.

Despite a strong democratic and economic recovery, South Korea was passed over for the award. The judging committee determined its progress was primarily a recovery from "entirely ridiculous and self-inflicted wounds" (an attempted imposition of martial law), which is a less compelling form of improvement than overcoming external challenges.

When evaluating others' success, ask if their strategy would work for most people who adopt it, or if it relied heavily on luck. If a strategy isn't reproducible and leaves many casualties behind, it's not a model to be learned from, regardless of the impressive outlier outcome.

Economic pressure forces leaders to prioritize immediate, bold actions over incremental gains. This creates a stigma against continuous improvement, which can be perceived as slow or lacking strategic impact. The mandate is for massive, transformative change, not small, sustainable steps.

To truly understand an investment's resilience, analyze its performance over a 20-year span, paying close attention to how it navigated major downturns like the dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. This deep historical analysis provides a clearer picture of stability than recent performance alone.

People have an extreme aversion to acute pain. They will accept any level of chronic pain—like a company slowly bleeding out over five years—to avoid the single, difficult conversation or dramatic change required to stop the losing. This explains the long, slow death of many companies.

When a public health intervention successfully prevents a crisis, the lack of a negative outcome makes the initial action seem like an unnecessary overreaction. This paradox makes it difficult to justify and maintain funding for preventative measures whose success is invisible.