Goal Setting Quote by David Leslie

“I’d like to see us improving on what we had last year” is the kind of sentence that tries to sound ambitious while keeping its hands clean. It’s managerial without being measurable: a forward-looking pledge that avoids the trap of promising anything concrete. The verb choice matters. “I’d like” isn’t “we will.” It’s preference dressed up as leadership, a soft modal that signals caution, politics, or both.

The subtext is a quiet negotiation with expectations. “Improving” implies last year wasn’t enough, but “what we had” also dignifies it as a baseline worth building on. That double move flatters past effort while creating room to demand more. It’s also a preemptive defense against volatility: if circumstances worsen, the speaker can claim the aim was incremental progress, not a revolution.

Because David Leslie’s profession is unspecified, the line reads like a generic press-conference answer, most at home in sports, corporate earnings calls, or public-sector performance talk. In any of those arenas, “last year” functions as a socially acceptable yardstick: it avoids direct comparisons to rivals, avoids naming failures, and quietly re-centers the story on internal standards.

What makes it work is its strategic vagueness. It invites everyone to project their preferred definition of “improving” onto it: better results, better culture, better processes, fewer mistakes. That flexibility builds consensus in the short term, even as it postpones the hard part - defining what success will actually look like when the next “last year” arrives.