The most helpful leadership idea I heard this year wasn’t from a LinkedIn guru or a best-selling management book, but from Chinese Astrology.
It turns out that 2025 was the Year of the Wood Snake—in other words, the year of shedding.
Look at what the advertising industry has shed this year: not just thousands of jobs, but entire agency networks. We’ve shed the faith that serving clients and making great work might save us from restructure.
We’ve even had to discard the certainty that advertising is an industry with career paths.
This stuff has been shedding for a while, but now it’s finally off. It’s painful. But with shedding comes new life.
Here is my counsel as we move into the next phase.
Let go of old structures
Nobody is looking to hire or buy the best agency of 2006 or 2016 today. This isn’t your model, or your reference point.
Know that the old world has gone, but something new is being born. Use this opportunity to actively let go of any ideas or processes that were starting to feel uncomfortable or irrelevant.
Identify your nuances
It’s no longer just about skills. Think beyond your title and your official deliverables to reflect on what sits beneath. What qualities do you possess because of this role, and how might that be relevant in new situations?
For example, you might be in client services, but as a result, you can quickly form deep, trusting relationships and clearly understand what others need. Use those qualities to your advantage as capabilities shift.
Take inventory of your resources
It’s easy to lose sight of the abundance you’ve accumulated. Most of the time, we don’t notice how much we have available to us.
List out every single person in your network, every asset, every capability. I guarantee you will find that you have more to build with than you think.
The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed
It really sucks to lose your job. But don’t let that feeling deprive you of the chance to figure out what’s next.
