It is easy to do half the job of reviewing the year and not finish the task. Remember that there are two parts of the review, whether you are considering sales, marketing, practice development or management issues. We need to look back and recognize our mistakes and even our failures. This is the part most firms do every year. Be sure you carry this part through to completion and look carefully at the things you can learn from efforts that were not as successful as you might have hoped. Try to understand what went wrong and why. Was there a failure at the planning stage? Was there a failure in the execution? Was the whole idea good but badly timed? Was it just a bad idea?  Then ensure that everyone who was part of the effort or part of the evaluation leaves the session with a list of things learned from the experience.

The second half of the job is reviewing the year for the things you did right. This part is so much more fun; yet it is the half of the review most commonly overlooked. It is important to celebrate the things you did right, the goals achieved, the victories won. After the confetti is cleaned up, be sure to analyze the successes, also. Why did these efforts succeed? What happened at each phase of the program or strategy that made the project a success? Was it the idea, the implementation, the people involved, the timing, the planning?  Learn from the successes just as you learn from failures.

In fact, it is often informative to hold up the successes and the failures side by side. You might learn even more from this kind of review.

We wish all of you a happy and prosperous New Year and we hope you learn valuable lessons from 2010 that will make you more successful in 2011.