EP33 - What 2025 Taught Me About Leadership, Learning, and Letting Go
I often hear leaders speak about years in terms of results. Revenue. Scale. Transactions closed. While those measures matter, they do not tell the whole story of a leadership journey.
In this Episode:
A reflective leadership perspective on learning, discipline, AI and human judgment. Francois Jacquemin shares lessons from 2025 on growth, synthesis, and building calm execution in complex environments.
For me, 2025 was defined by something quieter and more durable. Growth through alignment.
It started with people. Conversations that had no immediate objective. Relationships that deepened rather than expanded. I was reminded that leadership is not built in isolation but refined in reflection. Interaction and introspection are not opposites. They strengthen each other.
Over the years, I have accumulated skills the way most executives do. One after another. Often under pressure. Often, with the belief that mastery looks the same for everyone. This year challenged that assumption.
Take something as simple as storytelling. For decades, I tried to force myself into a structure that did not fully fit me. I admired leaders who could start with a perfect storyline and then build everything around it. That was never how my mind worked. I learned this year to accept that my clarity comes at the end of the process, not the beginning. Ideas first. Structure later. Acceptance brought calm. Calm brought quality.
Podcasting played a central role in this evolution, not as a branding exercise, but as a discipline. It forced me to distill complex thoughts into something coherent, respectful, and human. Leadership communication is not about volume or sharpness. It is about synthesis. Saying less, but meaning more.
Another major lesson came from my renewed work on artificial intelligence. My academic roots are in applied mathematics, where models and data serve a clear purpose. What has changed is not the existence of AI, but its accessibility and speed. The real shift is not technological. It is human.
AI is not an alternative to leadership. It is an extension of it. Machines can process, analyze, and propose. Humans must decide, contextualize, and remain accountable. The organizations that succeed will not choose between humans and AI. They will design teams where both are respected for what they do best.
This realization also reshaped my leadership philosophy. Simplicity is not the absence of complexity. It is the result of having faced it honestly. Principles matter. Convictions matter, not as rigid rules, but as anchors in uncertain environments.
As I look toward 2026, I do not see a finish line. Learning does not stop because a calendar changes. Leadership does not become static because experience accumulates.
The objective is continuity. Learning. Sharing. Creating. With discipline. With humility. And with a clear understanding that progress, when it is real, often feels calm rather than dramatic.
That is the kind of leadership I continue to build.
Timecode:
00:00 Reflecting on 2025: Personal Growth and Relationships
00:52 Career Evolution: Skills and Storytelling
03:26 Discovering the Power of Podcasting
06:22 Embracing AI: The Future of Human-Machine Collaboration
10:40 Looking Ahead: Continuous Learning and Future Aspirations
François Links:
Apple Podcast
Transcript:
Let's do a short recap of what 2025 meant for me, what I've learned, a few things I've done, and maybe I will start with people. I enjoyed very much the persons I've met this year. I have been able to also grow with some of the friends and relationships I had in the past. It was a growth year for me. It is a growth year, rich with interaction. It was a growth year also rich with introspection, and both were hand-in-hand.
Throughout my career, which is not so short, not the longest, but let's say a few decades, I was able to learn skills. I was always fighting and working very hard to expand on the skills I had learned, acquiring new ones, and this year was no different. I worked very hard on A.I. I worked very hard also on bringing the skills I've learned in the past together and understanding also better my abilities.
I'm just going to take a couple of examples. Early in my career, there was no PowerPoint, or it was a very early stage of PowerPoint. I believe it didn't exist then at the time, but it was actually... no, it was existing. And it was more like drawing things and bullet points, and ugly green and blue. But it is a tool that evolved throughout my career.
Storylining in creating a storyline was important. A person in my career was extremely strong. It was not at the beginning of my career, but in the middle of my career, it changed my view of using PowerPoint to create a story. Initially, I was just putting slides together, and it was a very short message in it, or a different message on different slides, but the storyline was not as important. That gentleman changed my view of it by giving extremely harsh feedback, but very positive as well, in the way that it was constructive, and I could build on it.
I was fighting all my career; it was my dream to be able to think about a story and then start putting that on slides. But it's never happened for me. This year I've learned on how to better approach and understand myself—how I developed stories, bring ideas together, and create the storyline at the end. So it's more like using the skills that I've learned in the past and allowing myself—my freedom, my creativity freedom, and my own way of thinking—to be used to create the storyline, which comes more at the end than at the beginning. Of course, the objective is the same, and so on, and the audience is the same, but the way it flows now, I'm much more at peace with it. And it took me a while to accept that.
Something else that I also learned this year was podcasting. I didn't do podcasts in the past. I was always dreaming about my own personal brand. And of course, I spoke in public. I was the face of a company where I was the CEO before. And I never really developed a narrative, and maybe a storyline, but it's not the storyline like I mentioned before for the PowerPoint presentation. It is my own story. It's my own sharing, my own thought, bridging a bit the gap between all those thoughts, or the moment where you think about topics and creating a synthesis about those topics, and sharing them. So it's about creating a short message, sharing those reflections, trying to make them understandable and understood, and hopefully, in a very positive way. I don't want to be abrasive; it's not at all the purpose here. But I've learned thanks to Tim helping me that first, it is possible. Second, it's a discipline. So it's not something that you can just do one day and forget the next day. It's keeping the discipline, which of course, in your career and leading a company, it's something that you have to have. But usually you have discipline for the business, for things that you do, but not necessarily for things that you are.
This podcast has helped me to also having this discipline and creating the synthesis, the bringing the quintessence of my thought into messages, and I'm really happy I could do that. And I'm really looking forward to keep on doing this in the future. It's allowing me also to simplify my leadership approach, I hope, and to be able to create the consistency for that in the future. Doesn't mean that it's fixed in stone or written on stone tables, not at all. But there are principles, there are convictions, there are ethos that I have that I want to keep as a basis for my future assignments and additional roles. That's very important to me. I did have the thought of that in the past, but this year it allowed me to bring them to life.
Another element that also I've learned is A.I. and the ability to create a team between A.I. and humans. It's not one or the other; it's one and the other. Let's be clear. A.I. is there to stay, whether you like it or not. The debate for it or not. Globalization is there to stay; it's not a debate. The way it happens can be debatable, of course, and is also shaping different strategies. It's going to shape different ways companies operate in business, and also is going to shape how client interactions are going to work in the future. But A.I. is there to stay, and humans are hopefully also going to stay, and they are going to work together. That's my strong conviction. That's how I see the future. That's how I see my future in business as well. It is not to be one-sided or to have one angle more than the other, but to be able to create an ongoing evolution of that teamwork for the future teams and for the future of the business.
I've learned that this year, thanks to the M.I.T. I've done a diploma with the M.I.T. But my initial training was as an engineer in applied mathematics. So it was really using theoretical models and data to create an outcome. So there's a problem, you use data and math to create a solution. And A.I. was part of the underlying theoretical model. And this is something that's been evolving. The more the tech and the ability to use the theory in practice, the better the outcome.
What we see today with all the A.I. models that are available for the public. But A.I. was there much before, much before that. The thought of A.I. is there for decades. My study was about that. At the time, it was more like how it was about creating efficiency or simplification of a plant, the ability for a little robot to do simple tasks and complexify them. That's been there. But that wasn't it at the time: not teamwork between human and A.I. No. It changed completely. There was a paradigm shift. I'm not a fan of using buzzwords, but let's use that one for this time. That before A.I. was available to the public and afterwards, and the speed at which human beings are using A.I. and picking up on all the models, not only for asking a question on the internet and finding the answer to a simple question, but the ability to do much more than that: to force, to make research, to force thought, to create.
So when I speak about create here, it is using A.I. to do the heavy lifting and have human intervention, a human being or a team of humans, using the outcome of what the model has given you, or whichever model is being used, and be able to refine it and to have a very concrete outcome.
That's something that my training didn't provide me at the time, and it's something that has been nagging me for a while. But it's something also where I was able to take time, do more work, and allocate thinking process and reflection time to come to this conclusion, which again, will be something that I will be able to use in the future.
So for me, it was a great year where I could focus on myself and focus also on using and learning more competencies. 2026 is coming very fast, and of course, continuity will be there. December 31st is not the end of my learning, of my fine-tuning of what I can share and what I can learn. Of course, in 2026, it'll go on. That's what I'm looking forward to. It's not to stop at some point. It's to keep on learning, keep on doing, keep on sharing, keep on creating. And I don't know what it'll be, but you know what? I'm damn looking forward to it.