2025 was a good year.
New role at a company I respect. Complex projects across defense and high-tech.
By traditional measures, it worked. Strong performance reviews. Projects delivered. Stakeholders satisfied.
But something interesting happened along the way.
I learned that the work I was being recognized for wasn’t always the work that mattered most.
And the moments when things actually moved forward rarely looked like the kind of productivity we’re trained to recognize.
This is what a successful year taught me about how work actually moves.
The Pattern I Started Noticing
Around mid-year, I realized I could predict which initiatives would succeed.
Not by looking at the project plans. Not by reviewing the analysis quality. Not by checking the governance structure.
By watching the conversations.
Projects moved when the right people were aligned before the decision meeting.
They stalled when everyone was working hard in different directions, producing excellent work that didn’t add up to progress.
The distinction was subtle but consistent.
And once I started seeing it, I couldn’t unsee it.
What Success Actually Looked Like
The projects that went well this year had something in common.
It wasn’t better analysis—though we did thorough analysis.
It wasn’t more meetings—though we had plenty of those too.
It was clarity about what everyone was actually solving for.
When engineering, procurement, operations, and finance all understood not just their own objectives but how those objectives related to everyone else’s constraints—things moved.
Not slowly through committee review. Quickly. Decisively.
When that clarity was missing, we produced motion: reports, meetings, updates, governance.
All necessary. All professional. All creating the illusion of progress while the actual decision remained stuck on something no one was naming.
The Difference Between Busy and Effective
I was busy for most of 2025.
Leading procurement across bid phases and complex projects. Representing procurement in executive steering committees. Mentoring junior staff. Developing sourcing strategies. Managing supplier negotiations.
Traditional productivity metrics would say I had an excellent year. And by those metrics, I did.
But the moments I’m most proud of weren’t the busiest ones.
They were quieter. Less visible.
A conversation with an engineering lead where we finally understood what flexibility actually existed beneath the rigid specification everyone assumed was fixed.
A short discussion with finance and project management team where we stopped defending our individual positions and started designing a solution everyone could support.
The moment when a project that had been “progressing” for months suddenly moved—not because we produced more analysis, but because we finally aligned on what we were actually trying to achieve.
These moments didn’t produce impressive deliverables.
They produced movement.
And I realized: this is what effectiveness actually looks like.
The Invisible Work
Here’s what performance reviews don’t capture:
The coffee with a supplier where you learn what’s really constraining their proposal—information that changes the entire negotiation strategy.
The hallway conversation after a steering committee where someone admits what they couldn’t say in the meeting—and you help them figure out how to say it next time in a way that works.
The hour spent understanding why two people are saying yes in meetings but not following through—and discovering they’re each waiting for the other to move first.
None of this appears in status reports.
But all of it determines whether your status reports will ever show green for the right reasons.
I spent years thinking this informal work was secondary to the “real” work of analysis and delivery.
2025 taught me it often is the real work.
The analysis and delivery are what happens when you’ve done this work well.
What I’m Taking Into 2026
Success in 2025 gave me something valuable: the confidence to trust what I was seeing.
That alignment often matters more than activity.
That the best work sometimes looks like you’re not working at all.
That being recognized as top talent doesn’t mean doing more of the same—it means understanding what actually created the value worth recognizing.
So 2026 will be different.
Not in abandoning what works. But in being more intentional about what “what works” actually means.
Being Part of a Team That Actually Wins
What I want most in 2026 is simple: to be part of a team that hits its targets.
Not just reports hitting targets on paper. Real achievement. Programs delivered. Cost targets met. Suppliers performing. Stakeholders aligned.
The kind of success where everyone on the team knows we did something meaningful together.
I’ve had individual recognition. That matters.
But what matters more is being part of something that works. Where procurement, engineering, operations, and finance function as a system, not separate functions coordinating through meetings.
Where we’re not just busy together—we’re effective together.
That’s what 2026 is about: finding and being part of teams where alignment isn’t the exception, it’s how we work.
Going Deeper, Not Wider
In a new organization, the instinct is visibility. Be everywhere. Volunteer for everything. Make sure everyone knows who you are.
I did some of that in 2025. It worked.
But the recognition came from depth, not breadth.
In 2026, I’m choosing depth deliberately.
Becoming genuinely expert in how procurement works in defense and high-tech programs. Understanding supplier dynamics in complex projects better than anyone else in the organization.
Not by presenting about it. By solving problems that surface expertise naturally.
Writing as Thinking
These reflections aren’t career branding.
They’re thinking out loud in a way that forces clarity.
When you write for an intelligent reader who doesn’t work in your company, you can’t hide behind jargon or organizational context.
You have to actually understand what you’re talking about.
This makes me better at the work that matters.
So 2026 includes more public thinking. Not to build visibility. To build clarity that makes the private conversations—where work actually moves—more effective.
Teaching the Invisible Skill
I have younger procurement professionals reaching out, asking how to be more effective. How to get noticed. How to advance.
What I want to teach them isn’t project management or category strategy—they can learn that anywhere.
I want to teach the skill no one teaches:
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How to read a room and understand what’s really stuck.
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How to have the conversation that unlocks the decision everyone knows needs to be made but no one has figured out how to make.
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How to create alignment without making it look like you’re doing anything special.
This doesn’t happen in training sessions. It happens in real projects where I can show what this looks like in practice.
Saying Yes to What Moves Things
The hardest change.
When you’re recognized as high-performing, more opportunities appear. More requests. More visibility. More activity.
The instinct is to say yes to all of it—because that’s what got you recognized in the first place.
But 2025 taught me something different.
The work that matters most is often the work no one requests.
It’s the conversation you initiate because you see misalignment forming.
The question you ask because everyone else is avoiding it.
The time you spend understanding before you start producing.
In 2026, I want to protect space for that work.
Even when—especially when—it means saying no to visible opportunities that don’t actually move things forward.
What Success Will Look Like
By the end of 2026, I want to look back and see:
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Fewer projects, deeper impact.
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Fewer presentations, more decisions unlocked.
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Less visible hustle, more invisible influence.
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Not more achievement—more meaningful achievement.
This is harder to measure than traditional metrics.
But after a year of success measured traditionally, I’m convinced the meaningful measurement is different.
The Gift of a Good Year
Here’s what 2025 gave me:
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The achievement that creates permission to be more selective.
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The recognition that creates space to be more intentional.
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The confidence that comes from knowing what you’re seeing is real, even when it doesn’t fit standard productivity narratives.
Most importantly: the realization that what makes work effective isn’t always what makes work visible.
And that understanding this distinction—really understanding it—changes everything about what you choose to optimize for.
I’m starting 2026 from a position of strength.
Not the strength of having proven myself—though 2025 did that.
The strength of understanding what actually created the value worth recognizing.
And choosing to do more of that, even when it looks less impressive in the moment.
Less motion. More movement.
Less activity. More alignment.
Less proving. More building.
That’s not just a goal for 2026.
That’s what success actually looks like when you’re paying attention to the right things.
And 2025 taught me to pay attention differently.
Here’s to a year of meaningful work—whether anyone’s watching or not.