A management column argues that a deliberate September review helps company leaders turn this year’s lessons into better decisions for the final quarter and 2027.
As September closes and the final quarter of the year opens, business leaders are being urged to set aside time for a structured review of how their organisations have performed so far — and whether they are still chasing the right goals.
The advice comes from the Daily Insight for CEOs column published by The Ghana Report, a regular leadership feature aimed at chief executives and senior managers.
The argument
The column frames strategic reflection as a forward-looking exercise rather than a post-mortem. The point, it says, is not to dwell on failures but to spot patterns in results and use them to sharpen the decisions that will shape the last three months of the year and the year ahead.
In other words, the review is meant to feed directly into planning, not to sit in a report that nobody reads.
What a review should cover
The column sets out five areas for leaders to work through:
- Progress made against the strategic objectives set at the start of the year.
- Lessons drawn from both wins and setbacks.
- The assumptions that sat behind major decisions, and whether those assumptions still hold.
- New opportunities and new risks that have appeared during the year.
- Turning each lesson into a specific, named action.
That last point is the difference between a useful session and a talking shop. A lesson that is not converted into an action item, with an owner and a deadline, tends to be repeated.
What the CEO personally has to do
Three actions are recommended for the chief executive. First, run a dedicated leadership reflection session rather than squeezing the discussion into a routine management meeting. Second, create room for honest talk about performance, including uncomfortable results. Third, carry the main lessons forward into stated priorities for the fourth quarter and for 2027.
The column offers one question for executives to put on the table: "What have we learned this year that should change the way we lead the organisation going forward?"
Why it matters
The underlying claim is straightforward: organisations that learn on purpose, rather than by accident, make better decisions, adjust more quickly to change, and perform better over time.
For Ghanaian businesses — and for diaspora-owned firms and family enterprises being run from the United States and elsewhere — the practical value is in the calendar discipline. A fixed annual point for honest review, with agreed follow-up actions, removes the temptation to keep pushing a plan that stopped working months ago.
This piece is a leadership opinion column rather than a news report, and the recommendations are general guidance rather than findings from any specific study.
