As firms head into retreat and strategic planning season, Jeremy Clopton makes the case on Episode 119 of The Upstream Leader that most of the big questions on the agenda, like AI adoption, M&A, talent strategy, client focus, are being asked in the wrong order. Before any of those can be answered well, there's a more fundamental question that needs to sit at the center of the room: "Who do we want to become?" It might sound simple, but Jeremy goes deep on why identity is the lens through which every other decision has to be filtered. When firms skip it, not by choosing to ignore it, but by drifting into an answer through inaction, apathy becomes the order of the day. And the exact same logic applies at the individual level too, for leaders who don't run a firm but are still navigating what kind of leader, colleague, or person they want to be.

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