Time for thoughtful reflection and communication should not be a luxury afforded only to spiritual leaders, writers and practitioners of Bikram Yoga. Compassion, kindness, courtesy and concern for our neighbors should not be values we engage in only when we have completed our to-do list or when business is good. These are values and practices that define the very quality of life we are all working towards.

It occurs to me that if we are to rebuild our organizations, our communities and our families in this time of turbulent change, we must learn to distinguish between what is urgent and what is important. Getting the overdue project we are working on off our desk is urgent. Treating an intern with respect, taking time to pause, reflect, contribute and provide a measure thoughtfulness and civility in our engagement with others – these actions are often not urgent, but they are important. They are important contributors to the quality of life we create for ourselves, our co-workers and the people closest to us.

So, I hereby pledge myself to resist the tyranny of the urgent and make time for what is genuinely important…… as soon as I finish the presentation I have to get out the door first thing in the morning.

Here are some excerpts:

What we want, what we need, what we must have are indispensable human beings. We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care.  We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference. Some organizations haven’t realized this yet, or haven’t articulated it, but we need artists.

Artists are people with a genius for finding a new answer, a new connection, or a new way of getting things done.

This is your opportunity. The indispensable employee brings humanity and connection and art to her organization. She is the key player, the one who’s difficult to live without, the person you can build something around.

What Would Make You Impossibly Good At Your Job?

If your organization wanted to replace you with someone far better at your job than you, what would they look for? I think it’s unlikely that they’d seek out someone willing to work more hours, or someone with more industry experience, or someone who could score better on a standardized test.

No, the competitive advantage the marketplace demands is someone more human, connected, and mature. Someone with passion and energy, capable of seeing things as they are and negotiating multiple priorities as she makes useful decisions without angst. Flexible in the face of change, resilient in the face of confusion.

The linchpin brings the ability to lean. He can find a new solution to a problem that has caused others to quit. His art, his genius, is to reimagine the opportunity and find a new way to lean into it.

Beginners luck is dramatically overrated.

Successful people are successful for one simple reason: they think about failure differently.

Successful people learn from failure, but the lesson they learn is a different one. They don’t learn that they shouldn’t have tried in the first place, and they don’t learn that they are always right and the world is wrong and they don’t learn that they are losers. They learn that the tactics they used didn’t work or that the person they used them on didn’t respond.

This is a great read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in developing and applying the qualities that make them indispensable.

Kurt Warner entered the NFL Draft at age 28.

Country singer K.T. Olsen released her first album at 47.

Colonel Sanders did not start his own business until he was in his 60’s.

Raymond Chandler published his first novel at age 51.

Ken Norton and Rocky Marciano did not take up boxing until they were in their 20’s.

Danny Aiello did not become an actor until after 40.

Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at 49.

Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at 58.

William S. Burroughs was almost 40 when he published his first novel.

The paintings Cézanne created in his mid 60’s are valued fifteen times as highly as the work he did as a younger man.

Tom Brady sat on the bench for the first two years of his college career. He was drafted #199 as a fourth string quarterback for the New England Patriots.

The one thing all of the achievers listed above have in common is that they were game changers in their chosen fields, and they all became more effective as they got older.   

Game changers come in all shapes and sizes.  If you are good at what you do and you keep getting better, do not be deterred, the best of what you can deliver is yet to come.

Some companies have paid a very high price to arrive at this realization.

Does anyone remember Circuit City’s now infamous cost cutting move to slash payroll expenses by firing the majority of their better compensated more experienced salespeople and managers?  

At the time the Washington Post reported:

Circuit City fired 3,400 employees in stores across the country yesterday, saying they were making too much money and would be replaced by new hires willing to work for less.

The company said the dismissals had nothing to do with performance but were part of a larger effort to improve the bottom line. The firings represent about 9 percent of the company’s in-store workforce of 40,000.

Here is the entire story from March 29, 2007:  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/28/AR2007032802185.html

By  January of 2009 the impact of this folly on Circuit City’s downward slide was irreversible – the company announced they were going out of business. By March of 2009 they closed their doors forever; 40,000 people lost their jobs, among them were a few short sighted executives who thought having less experienced, cheaper salespeople was the answer to their problems.

Orchestrator’s Note: I first heard about the Circuit City story through the wonderful NPR program “This American Life”.  If you’ve never heard Ira Glass breakdown a story, it’s worth checking your local listings to hear his show. You can find podcasts of the show here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org

Many years ago, Sting was asked by an interviewer, what it was like to release a solo album after such a successful run with The Police. He said he thought it was silly to call his latest project a “solo” album in that he collaborated on it with some of the best jazz musicians in the world. Sting, who has worked as a school teacher and a ditch digger, has since gone on to sell millions of records in his “solo” career and he has collaborated with great musicians from genres as diverse as Jazz, Blues, Classical, Middle-Eastern Pop, Latin, Opera and Elizabethan Folk;  always ready to share the credit for his artistic success.

No worthy enterprise is a solo effort. All require leaders, risk takers, believers, supporters, followers, collaborators – virtually nothing is accomplished alone. Throughout my career I have been privileged to work for and alongside very gifted colleagues, clients, employers and supporters, without whom I would not have been able to achieve meaningful success in my own endeavors.  I have had the satisfaction of making a contribution to worthy initiatives that made a difference in the lives and businesses of others.  At times I have profited from my contribution in tangible ways, and sometimes my reward was simply the satisfaction of knowing I was part of a worthy cause. The role of supporter, witness, counselor and cheerleader to a friend or colleague does not always pay in hard currency, sometimes the rewards are less tangible, but no less valuable.   

Today we have tons of great tools for maintaining our personal and business networks. Some are extremely useful for building and nurturing our circle of business and professional contacts. The real value in using tools like LinkedIn and Facebook  is not in the quantity of people we have in the various networks we manage, but rather in the nature of the relationships they help us sustain. Integrity, respect, authenticity, camaraderie, support, empathy, responsiveness, effectiveness – these are the qualities that form the basis of meaningful and enduring relationships – whether personal or business. These are the distinctions that matter most when we are called upon to build or become part of a new team. These are the distinctions that add genuine value to the relationships we have developed over the years.

Are you someone people turn to when they need help? Can you be counted on to deliver when it matters most? This is how we build equity in our relationships; it is how we become part of someone else’s indispensable currency. This is how we find our way to something larger than ourselves. Life is not a solo project.

“Make new friends but keep the old; one is silver the other gold”. 

Are you invested in precious metals? Are you one?

 No one denies the earth is shifting under the major broadcast and cable networks. DVR’s, You Tube and hundreds of other digital platforms provide often compelling alternatives to appointment television. However, great content will always find a way into our entertainment diet and at the moment cable and broadcast television are providing high quality content options that are keeping the medium interesting and viewers tuned in.  TV continues to be the medium of choice for live sporting events and breaking news.  TV content is expensive to produce and revenues will have to keep pace with the cost of production in order to sustain the quality of programming cable and broadcast networks deliver for free. The media landscape is changing, but at the moment TV networks are finding new ways to effectivelycompete for viewers and advertising dollars – mainly by delivering great entertainment value and using digital platforms to offer viewers more ways to engage the medium.

 All advertisers need to have a great digital strategy to drive conversion and acquire new customers. However a great digital strategy should not preclude the effective use of traditional TV advertising when it makes sense.  Need proof? Have you seen Google’s latest TV spots?  Google TV Spot

 My theory as to why this took so long, why critical thinking and innovation took so long to make its way into mainstream business orthodoxy, emerges from the old axiom “a high tide raises all boats”.  A robust economy forgives many sins. In a boom environment, not rocking the boat is often a more important skill for moving forward than making a better one.  Just ask any senior manager at Ford and GM or any compliance executive at A.I.G.

It’s not like we haven’t had plenty of innovators come out of academia over the last 20 years.  However, many of our most forward thinking business innovators usually come from outside of the mainstream business establishment.  They succeed despite the prevailing models for doing things, not because of them.  Many of them were outsiders, geeks and dropouts, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and Bill Gates are just a few high profile examples of incredibly successful business people who never graduated from business school. In fact they didn’t graduate from college at all.

Part of what happens when so much disruptive change occurs, when the folly in the accepted way of doing things is so brutally revealed,  often to devastating  effect, is that we, individually and collectively, begin questioning what is not working and why.  A kind of “critical and analytical” evaluation of reality is thrust upon us in the name of survival. We are forced to discard what no longer works, innovate new business models and in the process, redefine what is possible.

 It is a very encouraging sign when our universities and corporate institutions begin to recognize that creativity, critical thinking and ethics belong in a business curriculum as well as the Boardroom, and that they are also, as a matter of fact, good for business.

Conan reportedly settled for 35 million dollars to walk away from his Tonight Show contract. He could have made more money by agreeing to take back his old slot later, but refused. Some say it was a bad play. I disagree. Jay Leno can easily continue doing his brand of  the Tonight Show for another ten years, or more. In agreeing to taking back his old time slot, Conan would have remained locked into the slot following Jay Leno for as long as Jay Leno wanted to do the Tonight Show, which was likely to be a long time. He would have also become the de-facto fall guy for a failed programming move that he was not responsible for orchestrating.

Last week it was Leno, Letterman and Coco that dominated the serious buzz among Bloggers, Twitters, Facebook users and media cognoscenti;  not the unveiling of the Apple tablet computer, arguably the most transformative new appliance since the iPhone.

For me the one useful take away that emerges out of the whole silly debacle is that,  despite the medium’s tendency towards self-inflicted punishment, TV is not dead – it’s still very much a part of our social media conversation. TV is not dead, but I’m pretty sure, unless you are an independent musician, D.J., artist, or exotic dancer – MySpace may very well be.

Gandhi and MLK used contagious ideas to engage, motivate and call to action large numbers of people who connected with their vision of justice and change. These concepts are the very similar to the marketing principles that drive the successful use of Social Media today. Surely not everyone building a community of followers, or a “Tribe” as social media evangelist Seth Godin might call them, are doing so for progressive or benevolent causes. But it is worth noting that these men created dramatic and enduring change without violence, without the support of powerful corporations and without easy access to mass media. They understood that compelling ideas, when communicated through communities of like minded people, can motivate large numbers of individuals to take action. And collectively those individuals can change the world.

Today, the average person has access to community building tools that did not exist in the time of Gandhi or MLK. Today it is so much easier for the average person or small organization to publish ideas and motivate others with a compelling call to action. As a marketer I am aware of and endorse the use of these tools for commerce and trade – even if it means I have to be subjected to hundreds of invitations to get whiter teeth or easily shed unwanted pounds. I am free to choose which messages I engage or ignore.

Social Media can help a start-up learn about their client’s needs, small companies are able to build reputations by adding value to their engagements with existing and prospective clients, entrepreneurs can identify potential new markets and design products to serve them. All of these things are made easier through the evolving Social Media tools that are available to most of us at little or no cost thanks to the internet. Good stuff, all of it.

As I think about MLK’s legacy, I am inspired by the power contained in a single compelling idea, and I am excited about how the tools, now in the hands of virtually everyone reading this blog, can amplify the voice of ordinary people to create extraordinary results. Yes purveyors of hate and exploitation also have access to these very tools, but I am not discouraged by this. U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis once wrote: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

All of us now have the ability to shed sunlight on those ideas and concepts that we find most compelling and share them with the communities that we build and nurture. To some that might mean tweets about whiter teeth or sharing sexy photographs that would otherwise have remained private.  To others, many others, it may mean finding ways to enrich the experience we share with our communities… to effect change, to speak truth to power, to hold companies accountable for the products they sell, to spread the word about great new music, films or cool new products…. to help shed light on someone’s vision, to help turn someone’s compelling idea into reality….. Ideas like this one:

“Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”   Martin Luther King – excerpt from “A Letter from A Birmingham Jail” –  4/16/1963

 Happy MLK Day!

In addition to being one of the great singers and lyricist  in rock, Bono is a founding member of One, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease in Africa and around the world. One: http://www.one.org/us .