Sailing Strong Tailwinds Without Sacrificing Your Calm Winds Discipline

Sailing in calm winds is a great reminder that small deviations can have an impact on the efficiency of the boat, which can easily compound to pleasantly cruising or sitting dead in the water.

Your organization likely has strong tailwinds to exploit throughout 2025, whether it be the rise of AI adoption, cheaper access to capital, relaxed regulatory environment, or something else.

Tailwinds are a double-edged sword, as they:

1. Present an opportunity to explore and exploit for growth
2. Allow for slippage in discipline and can lead to complacency

The latter is especially dangerous when the winds stagnate or shift to a headwind.

Both corporations and nonprofits are subject to this challenge, as each can experience drifts in its mission or strategy, plus how it executes on that, to exploit the tailwind.

However, without maintaining a level of discipline while riding a strong tailwind, the organization places itself in need of a constant tailwind, which is not effective nor sustainable long term.

Let’s use an example of a strong tailwind with the fast paced expansion of AI’s capabilities.

AI is easy to get started with and plug into practically any business process and integrate with most systems, which lowers the barrier to entry for practically any size organization.

However, that convenience and market hype creates conditions that are ripe for dropping discipline.

For example, here are a few risks associated with riding the strong tailwinds that AI provides:

• AI’s accessibility allows for implementing solutions that are fully reliant on technology and atrophy skills of your organization’s employees
• There is both speculation that vendors have underpriced to grow adoption, plus a recent admission by OpenAI’s CEO that their $200 per month Pro tier is unprofitable due to high usage
• AI can even erode your organization’s unique value like personal connection and rapport with customers when used indiscriminately

All of those are compounded by the rapid growth in capabilities, features, and vendors, plus the potential regulation of AI that may appear across the geopolitical landscape.

TLDR: Don’t forget that your strong tailwinds will pass and you’ll still need to maintain growth through discipline in calm winds.