You’re so proud of your new vision statement. It sounds nice. Inspiring, even. But the vision is useless unless it can direct action.

Your vision lays out a destination; your destination guides your strategy; and strategy chooses action. It’s action that leads to success. In those moments of action, having clear direction is crucial for building momentum. If your organization is like most, you spent weeks debating every word crafting your vision, mission, strategy, and goals. But no matter how lofty, if they aren’t created in a way that provides direction, those statements are little more than high-priced indulgences.

Every company means something different by the words “vision” and “strategy.” One person insists that “Provide our customers the highest possible quality widgets” is a vision. A friend takes one look and assures him, “That’s a strategy.” Here are some useful definitions that will help you decide if you’ve set a direction that can truly get traction.

Envisioning the future

Vision is timeless. It’s based on who/what you want to do. It’s why you’ve got an organization in the first place. It must be specific enough that everyone can use it to decide if their work is moving the company forward. Progress towards the vision must be measurable. A vision is independent of specific competition, and while it may mention the customer, it must guide even someone who doesn’t know the customers’ mind. The best visions imply whom the company serves, what it provides, and what distinguishes it from other companies providing the same products and services. Vision sets the broad direction. It says, “Go west, young man.”

Wrong: We will provide exceptional products and services that our customers value.

This vision requires knowing the customers’ mind in order to understand what the company provides. It doesn’t distinguish what is unique about the company, since presumably everyone in the market produces something customers value.

Right: We will help boat owners everywhere navigate new seas with geographically based directional products and services.

This vision tells us the market, the product (navigation products and services), the distinguisher (geographically based), and the progress measurement (delight).

Some organizations may call this a mission statement, rather than a vision. Or, they may have both a vision and a mission, with the vision expressing the ideal world or company, and the mission expressing the company’s purpose. For our purposes, they’re the same. A mission statement rounds out the vision. Together, they give timeless, overarching principles chosen by the company that express the company’s reason for being.

The strategy thing

Strategy links the destination (vision) with current reality. Strategy applies to the whole company, and answers the question “How will we reach our vision, given current market conditions, competitive scenario, regulatory environment, etc.?” Strategy is narrower than vision, but broad enough to guide companywide organization structure, hiring, capabilities that must be developed, and so on. Strategy says, “We’re going west, but we ran into this grand canyon. We can go around to the north or south. Let’s choose south.”

For example, a company may have a vision to “provide scientifically proven technology to solve the medical needs of consumers and hospitals.” In the 1950s, the strategy may be doing in-house research, hiring and developing scientists, and a compensation program based on discovery. In the 1990s, the same company may have a strategy of acquiring small drug-making companies and buying and protecting patents from other companies. Both strategies will reach the vision, but they are appropriate for different competitive environments, and they have different organization structures, different financing options, and different operational characteristics.

You know you have a strategy if you chose your current path from many alternatives, all of which would have reached your vision, each of which would have required hiring different people and building different systems. If you didn’t consider many alternatives, or you didn’t choose your alternative considering your competition, your vision, and your current market conditions, then you probably have a tactic, not a strategy. If you can execute your strategy with your current people, reward systems, and organization structure, then it’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic.

The tactics

Tactics are limited in scope, typically just to a part of the company. They’re shorter term than a strategy. They involve executing given the existing capabilities and resources of the company. Unlike strategy, tactics generally work within the current organization structure, rather than changing the organization. Tactics say, “We’re on the south path. Let’s travel two miles today.” Your tactics probably won’t work unless they’re generated from a strategy that lays out a consistent philosophy for how your company will compete/win/attract customers in today’s market.

Your “moments of truth” are those moments in time when you build traction and momentum. For example, a moment of truth in creating a quality-driven organization might be when the CEO refuses to ship a poor-quality product, even though it will hurt quarterly numbers. Moments of truth always happen during a tactical action. That’s why you need a vision and strategy—without them, people won’t have the guidance to ensure they can move the company forward in that moment.

Your strategy also helps you find your moments of truth. If your strategy involves locking up important distributor relationships, your moments will involve reputation and relationship building, creating the perception of value to the distributors, and establishing negotiating leverage to capture an exclusive relationship. If your strategy is to be a low-cost provider, moments of truth might be times when opportunities for efficiencies arise, or incidents where you can encourage a “continuous improvement” mindset in your team.

At the end of the day, your vision and strategy only exist to drive tactics. And often, the most significant tactics are those moments of truth whose effects are far-reaching. When your vision sets direction and your strategy ties it to your current situation, they provide a compass for everyone in your organization to follow for years to come.

Summary of Vision, Strategy, and Tactics

Wow, what a pretentious title for this note. I hope it lives up to its promise.

THE SCENE BEGINS IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL:

Last weekend, I saw Signs of Life, the Off-Broadway play about life in Terezin, the model concentration camp the Nazis created to show how well the Jews were being treated. My collaborator Joel Derfner composed the show. The acting and singing was excellent. It was very emotional, and left us in a state of profound … profundity. They announced an after-show talk, and my first thought was, “I hope the cast isn’t there.”

My reaction surprised me. I usually love hanging out with creative types, and really love my actor friends. But in this case, despite the actors’ skill, I wanted to preserve the distance. What was up with that?

CUT TO:

I’ve done a lot of public speaking over the years. Whatever “it” is, I have it. Crowds respond to me. Recently, a speaker with a microphone was trying to get the attention of a room. I stood up, looked around, and said “let’s sit down now” in a slightly louder-than-normal voice. Everyone turned around and sat down. At one speech a few years ago, the tapes of my session sold out while the session was still in progress.

Right now, I’m in my first show since forever. I’m an ensemble member with a full five or six speaking lines. Acting someone else’s line and characters is very different from public speaking. We’ll see how it goes.

CUT TO:

My friend Jamie Kent is building a career as a musician. He’s done a lot of theater and is now learning to perform as a musician in venues where some people are attentive fans, while others are drunken revelers. He and I spoke for a while today about the nature of being on stage. He’s found that doing theater is very different from performing music live, and life music seems different from public speaking. He’s still going up the learning curve. I’m watching.

WHAT I’M LEARNING ABOUT STAGE

Acting, public speaking, and performing music are all ways for one person to engage hundreds or thousands of others. There are critical differences that demand different skills in all three. Yet all three depend on the nature of the relationship between performer and audience.

Stage is story.

One-on-one conversation is easy. We adapt to each other and react to each other’s points. It’s conversation. When one person is engaging an audience, I find it helps me be more powerful to think in terms of story. There’s always a story.

Actors. In acting, there’s a story being told. The actors are the medium. They’re an odd medium, since their skill is in knitting their own authentic emotions into building blocks for characters who they aren’t. The audience’s reaction is to the story, not the actors. The story is made more real through the skill of the actors, but the best actors are the ones who create a character so strong you forget the actor. Sean Penn in MILK was this amazing.

The audience is voyeur, watching the story without being part. Though some stories occasionally break the fourth wall and a character talks directly to the audience, the characters don’t expect an answer, and the audience doesn’t expect to give one. Even the breaking of the fourth wall is, itself, part of the story. (If you’ve seen Avenue Q, you’ll recognize the awkwardness of what happens when the fourth wall breaks. We wonder: are we supposed to participate, or continue our part outside the production?)

For the actor, the challenge is to create a character and story without directing it at the audience. The completeness of the character and the power of the direction is the compelling event that makes the audience want to watch. An actor uses their authenticity to create the character, but their job is to create a fiction with that authenticity.

The actors in Signs of Life did such a good job that I didn’t want to meet them in person. The story was too powerful; I didn’t want to meet them not as their characters.

Public speakers. Public speakers tell the story, and their role is narrator. Since they’re outside the story, the audience can interact with the narrator about the story. The audience is in conversation with the speaker about the story.

For the speaker, the challenge is engaging in a conversation with the entire audience as a whole. The speaker must align themselves with the audience and share the audience’s discovery of the material the speaker is providing. Authenticity works well in public speaking, because people can often pick up when someone’s faking or restraining themselves, and people like to have conversations with people who are interesting and real.

My “it” when public speaking is maybe a mild form of autism spectrum disorder that I’ve managed to turn into a huge asset (joking… I think): like many geeks, I can’t maintain a social facade. What you see is what you get. I suffer from involuntary authenticity.

Leaders. Leaders also tell the story as narrator, but there’s an additional level: there’s the story of what it means to be together, sharing that story. When an audience gathers to be led by Lori Leader, Lori tells stories that bring up emotion in the followers. But the more powerful story is the story of why people are listening to Lori in the first place.

Oprah might tell a story about an abused child. She’s narrator, aligned with the audience to discover truths about abuse. The larger story that many of her followers hold, however, is that by allowing Oprah to be their narrator, they will have richer, more fulfilling lives.

For the leader, the challenge is working both of these messages at once. The leader must have a conversation with the audience about the material, just as a public speaker must. The leader also needs to have a separate conversation, about what that conversation means. “Join me to talk about race relations. [I'll narrate.] Just by being here, you’re showing your commitment to help change the world. [The conversation about the relationship.]”

Musicians. For musician, the challenge is being both actor and speaker. The songs and what they mean to the audience are what forms the story. People see live music because they want to be in conversation with the musician, yet they want a conversation they know: the music that tells the story the audience wants to experience. Audiences can sometimes even get upset if the musician performs a song differently from how they performed it on their album. The audience wants the story (song) they know, plus the emotional connection they get with a narrator. The musician must create both the narrator relationship and provide the story to engage the audience.

Jamie’s learning curve is likely related to the challenge of the duel relationship of actor and speaker/narrator. His pre-music performing experience was all as actor, and he’s just beginning to wrestle with the need to be with the audience even as he’s acting in the story of the music.

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

My larger story is that sometimes, my insights can help others get clarity on issues in their life. I’m hoping you find something useful, or at least entertaining, in these ideas. Let me know.

I’m just playing with these ideas, as I delve into performing more than I’ve ever done. I’d be curious to know how you think about being on stage. What stories do you tell? How do you relate to your leaders, actors, teachers, and musicians?

P.S. I’m available as a public speaker, by the way…

Think about the future. Notice what kind of events you expect to happen in the future. Think about the projects you have going on. Think about the good things you expect to happen, and how you plan for them.

You’ll notice that you have a preferred time horizon that you automatically use without thinking about it. For some people, considering “the long term” means thinking five months out. For other people, it means thinking ahead a hundred years… or a thousand years. I’m not talking about the time pressure from Wall Street or other managers; I’m talking about the mental timelines that all of us have, that we use to plan our lives.

Your Time Horizon Matters

The time horizon you use makes a huge difference in how you make decisions. If you naturally have a long time line, you may be able to create great long-term plans. You might not be so good at the short-term, however. Unfortunately, you have to pass through the short-term to get to the long-term, and if the short-term has some surprises, you can be caught unawares. I met a startup entrepreneur whose timeframe was years. He was mentally in a future where his company was already an industry leader. Unfortunately, he lived in that future and didn’t really pay much attention to the next six months. His company hit a few snags, and rather than focus in on the short term, he was so wedded to his long-term vision that he assumed “everything will work out.” It didn’t really penetrate that *he* was the one who had to make it work out.

A purely short-term time horizon is great for day-to-day survival. A short-term calendar has its own problems. It’s easy to make decisions that seem great in the short-term, but lead to long-term ruin. A friend of mine thought his decisions through about three weeks out from the present. Three weeks is less than a credit card statement cycle, however. Each month he would run up more and more credit card debt, because his decisions about “can I afford this?” never really considered the need to pay back the credit card, four weeks in the future. It took him 15 years to pay down the credit card debt he accumulated in college.

Use a Deliberate Time Horizon

Next time you make a decision—about work, or family, or home life—consciously consider the same decision and its consequences on a 2-week, 6-month, and 5-year time horizon. You may find that different decisions work best with different time scales. That’s a good thing! It lets you understand the interplay between short and long-term consequences.

My friend Michael Linenberger noticed that having a to-do list that’s so long your brain wants to explode also has a timeframe attached to it. Different items on your to-do list are associated with different time distances in the future. He’s designed a complete system to take advantage of how people think about time and activities to handle task management with no stress. His system meshes naturally with how people process near-future tasks differently from medium-future tasks, differently from far-future tasks. Today (immediate future), his book on the system is launching and I encourage you to check it out and buy a copy:
   http://masteryourworkday.com/

Next week (medium future), try his system for a week. Just do it for a week and find out whether taking timeframes into account improves your ability to juggle the demands of a task-heavy workload. Then in six months, if it’s still working for you, start asking where else in your life you can take timeframes into account, so you make better decisions and build your life into more of what you want it to be.

I had a customer service need today. I called the company, whom we’ll call Canadian Mozy, and got a very nice young man named “Johnny.” He seemed to have a genuine American accent, clearly understood my issue, and was able to respond in complete sentences. That’s a good first start. Sometimes, I call a company and someone with a thick foreign accent answers, introducing himself as “Biff Johnson.” That’s a bad sign, especially if you recognize the accent and know that folks in that culture rarely have names like Biff. When a company’s first instruction to their phone reps is, “lie about your name,” you know you’re in for a real treat.

A lot of companies know that having polite reps who tell the truth makes a good impression. Canadian Mozy certainly understood this.

Johnny listened to my problem and explained, “we used to do what you’re asking for. We see we’ve done it for you several times. But our new policy is that we won’t do it any more.” Interestingly, I was asking for something that had no business implications for Canadian Mozy. It did not require them to spend a penny on my request. It did not expose them to any additional risk, nor did it obligate them to anything in the future. It was free for them to provide, they’d provided it before, and some random mid-level pinheaded bureaucrat decided to retract the policy.

Politeness Wasn’t Enough

Did I get good service? Johnny provided extremely polite service. He was gracious and dealt with my hissing, booing, and making funny noises into the phone with professional aplomb. But he was powerless to fix the situation.

As a result, I’m pulling tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of business from Canadian Mozy and shifting it to other vendors. Though Canadian Mozy likes to trumpet themselves as a “partner” to the small businessperson, they aren’t. Their reps aren’t allowed to think for themselves, and the managers who set their policies don’t understand a whit about how to evaluate the actual business impact of a policy decision. They eliminated a policy that gave customers great value at no expense to themselves, and never thought about how customers might react.

This brings me to the much misunderstood truth about customer service:

• Good customer service requires good style. Your customer support reps must speak the language of your callers, shouldn’t tell obvious lies, and should be polite, courteous, and trained to deal with irate, irrational customers.
• Good customer service also requires good execution. Your customer support reps must have the training to investigate someone’s problem, and the ability to do something about it, especially when the request is one you’ve honored in the past and which has no downside for you but tremendous upside for your customer.

If you’re missing style or executions, customers get upset. In the language of kindergarten, good support comes down to this: be polite and keep your promises.

I’m Twittering today. And I’m Facebooking. And I’m blogging. And I’m writing my newsletter and my podcast. In pursuit of building my so-called personal brand, I’m getting my name out there and sharing my brilliance with the world. Once I get some decent lighting, 2010 will see me introduce a video blog as well. Yessiree, I’m building that brand right on up. Yup. Building that brand. Look at it go. Right on up there…

What’s striking, however, is that none of this pays a cent. Not only does it not pay, but it conditions people to want my content for free. I had the audacity to pose a question to my Twitter subscribers last week, to get some suggestions for an upcoming episode. One happy person responded, “Dude, STOP ASKING US how to get stuff done and START TELLING US how to get it done!” I have hundreds of pages of free articles. I have written close to 500 pages of podcasts, all freely available, and apparently that’s not enough.

The social media promise

The theory is that social media lets people discuss my products and services without my intervention. I can now enter into a dialog with my customers, that will let me optimize my products, respond to my markets, and manage my reputation real time. The magically I’ll be successful and have a thriving business. That sounds really good on paper.

Then I think for a moment. I’ve always been able to read reviews of my products. I’ve always been able to survey my customers. And if I’m at all smart about handling customer queries and support calls, I can even optimize my products and design in solutions for my customers based on their problems. In short, pretty much everything social media can do for me, I could do in a pre-social media world. So what’s the difference?

The social media cost

One big difference is the cost. Maintaining an ongoing social media presence is a huge use of time and effort. If I were a big company, I might hire someone full time to do nothing but tweet, twitter, Yelp, Blorp, and Blubber. But as a one-man shop, I have to do all this myself. Then I have to track the responses and figure out which channels are actually getting attention (that will change in six months, requiring another full round of marketing research), and then generate content content content.

At some point, I’m apparently supposed to develop products and services, which is where I make the money. And by the way, those products and services better contain content I haven’t given away for free in the process of generating all this social media.

My prediction

Where will this go? Based on my own experience, I think social media will continue to be important as a channel for monitoring end consumer needs, wishes, and experiences using products. At the end of the day, it’s a giant gossip network, and your reputation is part of your brand, so you’ll have to manage it.

When it comes to content from businesses to customers, I don’t think it’s sustainable. The free content generation will die down over time, unless there’s a clear return on investment to it. Quality content is hard to produce. Companies that can afford to hire someone to be a web presence will do so. They’ll be able to produce high-quality content on an ongoing basis.

Small businesses and solopreneurs will gradually drop out of the fray, simply because the demands are too great and the returns too small. It takes good education and/or experience to be able to generate huge amounts of quality content, and those things are expensive. How much time should a smart, capable, good person with great writing skills spend giving away their knowledge for free without expecting a return? If there’s a demand for high-quality content (which there may not be), it will mainly be on a subscription model.

The few who manage to attract large followings will do great, of course, but that’s always been the case. And attracting a large following seems to be a function of direct marketing skill, more than high quality content creation skill.

Bottom line: in five years, by 2014, we’ll see the quality of free content dropping as the high-quality content creators turn their attention to activities that actually drive their business. Social media will remain important for reputation management, however, and as a tool for monitoring our customers and what they’re thinking.

I’m flying this morning. More accurately, I’m waiting in line after line after line at the airport. Once, I needed my boarding pass. Then I needed my boarding pass and driver’s license. Now, I need my credit card, too. Every line brings a new, extra charge. The check-in kiosk gleefully says it costs $15 for my first checked bag. At the gate, the little headphones cost me. On board, a pillow and blanket—once free free—now cost big bucks. And don’t get me started on the snacks.

Every price tag becomes a separate purchase decision. Every purchase decision makes an impression. The airline has me asking “Is this worth it?” a dozen times during a single flight. And every extra decision risks my deciding “No.”

Any good sales person knows you want your customers crying Yes, Yes, YES! As soon as I think No, they’ve lost me as a customer.

If you offer options, do it at once.

When you have lots of little add-ons that someone can choose up front, that’s fine. Call it “customization.” If I’m buying a new Mini Cooper, I get to run the Mini Cooper customizer. It becomes a game to choose the white racing stripes, chili pepper red paint job, fancy suspension, and cool hubcaps. Will I pay extra to customize? You bet. And since it’s a one-time fantasy fest, I only have to abandon common sense once to sign on the dotted line. Now I have my cool car with lots of options, and I love the chance to go into debt for life for my new tricked out Cooper. But only if it’s a single purchase decision, where the excitement happens all at once. One purchase, and I can enjoy my car forever.

Don’t take away what used to be free.

Of course, don’t customize add-ons that are expected as part of the base product. If I had to pay extra to make sure my Mini came with wheels, it would be annoying, not delightful. But since the car comes with wheels, all my attention is blissfully on my Speed Racer fantasies.

For Goodness’ sake, never start charging for something that used to be bundled into the price. People hate losing things. When once my plane pillow and blanket were complimentary, charging extra for them stirs resentment.

You might think airlines have to start charging for the extras or they’ll go out of business. Maybe. But maybe not. If they just tacked $50 onto the ticket prices and announced that they still give “free” blankets, pillows, and checked luggage, I suspect many people would be willing to purchase. All it takes is one nickel-and-dime experience to realize that a low price ticket might be a smokescreen for an expensive bundle of travel “add-ons.”

If airlines want to offer variable pricing, they shouldn’t charge extra fees. Instead, they could frame the choice as a discount: you get $7 off your ticket if you decline a pillow and blanket. More people would take the blanket and pillow (people often just accept the defaults), so the revenues would be higher. Yet those who really care can still get the lower price. Furthermore, people would be imagining their flight with all the goodies, and would be inclined to forgo the discount since it would seem like losing that amenity—and remember, people hate to lose extras.

How many purchase decisions do your customers make?

What’s your product or service? Do you offer it as a series of purchase decisions? Try an experiment: create an all-in-one pricing bundle and offer discounts for unused options, rather than extra charges for extra options. Track how many customers choose to the default options, how many customers purchase again, and how satisfied customers are with their purchase. You just may find that the best way to serve your customers is to charge them more.

[Note: the way decisions are presented to people makes a huge impact in what they choose. This is called “decision architecture.” You can learn all about decision architecture in the book “Nudge.”]

Stupidity is running rampant, world wide. It’s frustrating, because the mistakes aren’t rocket science. They’re really simple stuff. People forget their actions have consequences. Let’s explore some cause/effect you should keep in mind, through the lens of current events. Think how these apply to you, so you aren’t surprised by the utterly predictable.

(This is going to be a provocative article. If it offends you, recommend me to all your friends. The provocation may cause many unsubscribes from my list from people who would rather indulge in knee-jerk responses than think for themselves. Oops!! That sentence just lost a dozen, right there…)

Ignore the competition and you’ll lose. Detroit has been whining about how they couldn’t have forseen the current downturn. In business school in **1989**–twenty years ago–we did cases about how uncompetitive the car companies were, and how they were ignoring foreign competition, etc. Anyone who lived through the gas lines and 50+ mpg Honda Civics of the late 70s and hears Detroit complain that they can’t get 30mpg by 2020 should have nothing but utter contempt for the executives running the Big Three.

If you hit people, they won’t sit there and take it. Hello, Israel and Hamas. Are you listening? Kids beat me up in grammar school. It didn’t make me like them. And if I’d been bigger and stronger, I would have hit back. When Hamas broke a cease-fire and sent rockets into Israel, what did they expect to happen? It isn’t a matter of history, or who deserved what. Just that simple question: what did they expect to happen, other than violent retaliation? (Terrorists knocked down two of our office buildings seven years ago, and we started two wars over it, with a body count that some say is over 100,000 civilians. Clearly, if you swat someone who has more firepower, they just might swat back.)

Debt is bad if not managed wisely. Learn this: if you spend $10 today that you don’t have, how can you expect to have $12 to repay it with interest tomorrow? This only makes sense if you invest the $10 with the expectation of making $12 or more. Thinking of credit cards as free money is dumb. Thinking of a $1 trillion yearly budget deficit being used to fund expenses (e.g. war) rather than investment (e.g. R&D, research, education, infrastructure repair) is dumb.

Deliberate get-rich-quick stupidity will be appropriately rewarded. Banks have a thousand-year history of how to evaluate good credit risks. When they write mortgages to people they would never lend to under prudent guidelines, they shouldn’t be surprised when it all collapses. And by the way, every manager involved should be fired. I’d rather have a high school student running the bank than someone with proven bad experience.

Pay current expenses with current dollars. People get so upset and angry about tax levels. Get over it, people. Borrow-and-spend is _more_ toxic than tax-and-spend; you have to pay back with interest. Unless you are spending on investment that will generate a return, tax-and-spend is a much, much healthier policy. In any event, tax vs. borrow is just a financing detail. The problem is *spend*. (And anyone who still believes either party is more fiscally responsible than the other needs to have their head examined. As far as I can tell, the Repubs are abhorrently irresponsible, while the Dems are despicably irresponsible.)

Don’t borrow if you can’t repay. See the previous paragraph. This applies to credit card holders, home owners, governments, and investment banks. If you borrow $100, you have to pay back $110 next year, or even more in following years. Borrowing gives you the illusion that you have a higher standard of living than you can afford. The world will happily correct that misapprehension.

People do what you pay them for, especially if there are no perceived consequences. I’ll let you find the examples for this one. Just look at politicians, lobbyists, and CEOs of failed banks. (Why, please remind me, are any of those people still there? Aren’t we supposed to fire people who demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt their utter, complete, and total incompetence to run a solvent business?) This applies to politicians, too. If we connected their pay and career paths to desired national outcome measures, you would likely suddenly see a whole different set of conversations in Congress.

Tim Sanders wrote a blog entry that references a Business Week article on information overload I commented on last week. The writer suggests that information overload might be good. There might be some valuable information, and besides, young people can handle it just fine.

Sure. In what universe? My Get-it-Done Guy podcast email and people’s reaction to my what is email costing you assessment, suggest many people of us feel our life force being regularly sucked from our bodies by information overload. It makes us jump from topic to topic. It interrupts us when we need to concentrate. And then we feel guilty that we still can’t keep up. Gee, that sounds like a resourceful emotional state for reaching our goals.

Yes, we’re getting more info. Yes, some of it’s useful. But that’s not the point! We need to ask: is it useful enough? Are the benefits—financial, social, or emotional—worth the cost?

For Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy (mentioned in the article), the answer is Yes. In email, they say things they would never say otherwise. Like that comment about the chocolate mousse, telephone pole, and garter belt. Who would ever say that out loud?

Of course, an anonymous suggestion box would fill the same function. Even better, the tipster could actually include the original garter belt. But apparently, those emails are amazing enough that Anne devotes a lot of time to her email. Since she’s gotten great results at Xerox, for her, the benefits might be worth the cost. (Assuming, of course, that her success is because of email, rather than in spite of it. Maybe a weekly suggestion box would be just as good.)

If you’re top dog, no one pays attention to how you use your time as long as you produce business results. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Our pointy-haired boss gives us specific goals, and email can suck up a lot of time without moving us towards our real goals. That “Top 10 Reasons Working Here Sucks” email will only help you reach your goal if that goal is a new job at your major competitor’s firm.

When you’re deciding how much time to spend with your inbox, think long and hard about the benefits you’re getting. After all, there’s lots you could be doing with that time. Ask yourself if there is any other way to get those same benefits? If you hired a $50/hour assistant to read and answer your email every day, what would you tell him/her to process versus ignore? Are you following those same guidelines?

Being perfect in every way, I follow my own advice and am ultra careful with my email habits. Even so, I often get sucked in for up to 30 extra minutes a day. Since I’m perfect, that must be the perfect amount of time to waste. But there’s still a nagging feeling: that comes out to three weeks per year. If I’m going to spend three weeks a year blathering mindlessly, I’d rather do it wearing a bathing suit on a sunny Caribbean beach than sitting hunched over my computer in my basement office, looking like one of the Mole People. At least on the beach, I might get a tan.

So don’t take my word for it. Don’t take Tim Sanders’s word for it. And don’t take Business Week’s word for it. Your email time is productive to the extent it helps you get what you want out of life. Hold it to a high standard and if it isn’t performing, drop it from your life faster than that stalker you accidentally dated in college. With email, only you can take control; there’s no way to get a restraining order.

A Financial Tailspin sucks! Don’t compound it.

We’re going through some … interesting … times, financially. People feel insecure, established institutions are in desperate need of bailout (funny how attractive socialism becomes when you’re the one who needs the handout) and the world economy seems to be teetering on the brink. Now’s a great time to realize: it’s all in our minds.

I mean this quite literally. Have you seen “Money as Debt?” It’s an excellent 47-minute video on where money comes from. It tells how our current system came to be. It highlights flaws in the system and offers some alternatives, all with a tasty dose of conspiracy theory thrown in here and there(*). You can watch the video here: http://www.SteverRobbins.com/r/moneyasdebt

Money is literally nothing more than an idea. It’s a promise we make to deliver a good, a service, or more money at a later date. Why is Bill Gates a billionaire? Because the rest of us agree that he is. We also agree to give him our stuff if he gives us enough money. But it’s all an agreement. Because it’s an agreement, we take action on it, and it’s our actions that have real-world consequences.

“Don’t worry, be happy.”

Bobby McFerrin’s song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” is right on the money. At any given moment, you may or may not be able to control what’s actually happening around you. But you can always choose your attitude about it.

I was in a meeting earlier this year, discussing a key feature of entrepreneurship: the ability to see opportunity where others see problems. Just for jollies, I decided to try spending a week deliberately asking, “Where’s the opportunity here?” every time a problem cropped up. Every single time I asked the question, I was able to find an answer. Often, in mere seconds.

The housing bubble gave many time in an elevated lifestyle

Then I asked, “What’s the upside of the financial crisis?” You know, one answer is this: millions have had the chance to live far beyond their means for many years. While we don’t much care for the consequences, at least they got to enjoy a standard of living they couldn’t have otherwise afforded. I’m serious about this, by the way. Of course it’s natural to be upset when losing your job, your credit, your home, or your car. But being upset won’t change anything. It will just make you feel bad. You can also choose to feel thankful that you had those things to begin with.

Be a Thanksgiving Gratitude Geek

Are there problems in the financial world right now? Yup. And we can live through those problems giving all our attention to the downside or giving all our attention to the opportunities and the upside.

My suggestion to you: spend this Thanksgiving dwelling on the upside. Ask yourself, “what do I have to be thankful for?” and make a big long list. Help everyone around you do the same thing. They say what we need is more optimism in the economy. Optimism isn’t something “out there,” it’s one of the few things we have control over. So let’s exercise that control and see the glass as 10% full, not 90% empty. Because we can’t always change the outside reality, but we can certainly choose our inner reality.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. Here are some of the things I’m thankful for:

• Friends and community
• Hot running showers
• Democracy
• My four-year-old iPod that still works great
• The chance to teach high school students at an after-school program
• Zipcar
• My podcast
• Friends and community

(*) I love conspiracy theories! I always like to remind myself that just because someone’s paranoid doesn’t mean the conspiracy doesn’t truly exist.

Are you committed to becoming a spot-on decision-maker who can make great decisions that actually guide your world? Because chances are, your personal decision-making process is no guarantee of that.

We’ve just finished two years of hate-filled, vitriolic lies and attacks. Most of us were swayed, one way or another, by the election rhetoric and talking heads. One thing is certain: few of us went to the candidates web sites, read their platforms and policies. Even fewer then consulted a range of economists, industry professionals, and others to figure out whether the policies were realistic, whether we have any data on that kind of policy, or whether they would even lead to the kind of world we want.

Pretty much all of us relied mainly on charisma (or lack thereof) and ideology (or lack thereof) and knee-jerk logic to make our decision. And yes, this means you, my above-average-intelligence friends! Intelligent people seem to believe that they understand things better, even though when it comes to politics, there’s no reason to believe that. Smarts are no defense against relying on shallow, biased media reports and cherry-picked statistics.

The challenge: improve your decision making!

Here’s my challenge to you: actually learn from this experience.

Whether you’re feeling fear, anger, hope, or happiness today, grab a piece of paper. Write down all your fears. ALL of them. If you are convinced our President-elect is a terrorist whose greatest desire is to bring down America, write that down. If you’re convinced he’ll raised your taxes, write that down. If you’re convinced that taxes a worse financing decision than debt when you’re running a deficit, write that down, too.

If you believe that America will become a hotbed of corrupt moral practices, write that down.

Now write down your hopes. If you believe we will magically become debt-free in an economic prosperity paradise brought on by a single change in President, write that down. If you believe that America will become a multicultural paradise of acceptance and love, put it on paper.

For both your fears and your hopes, jot down the basis (or lack thereof) you have for those beliefs. You are the ONLY ONE who will see this, so be honest. Expect to have fairly little evidence for any of this.

You know now what you’re projecting on this candidate, good or bad. You could be wrong about a lot of what you’ve written. In fact, you probably are. And you’ve done this with every election you’ve ever voted in.

Now is the time to learn, instead.

Arrange to re-evaluate your decision-making in 2012

Head over to TimeCave.com, and schedule an e-mail to yourself to be delivered in July, 2012. Type in everything you’ve written. Also paste in the following debrief form. Then in 2012, you may be able to make an even higher-quality decision than you did this year.

DEBRIEF OF MY 2008 DECISION
1. Where was I right in my ability to project the candidate’s results?
2. Where I was right, how much of that was due to the candidate’s efforts, and how much of that was external factors that the candidate couldn’t control?
3. Where was I wrong?
4. How much of *that* was under the candidate’s control?
5. Where did I get my information about the candidate?
6. Am I using the same or different sources this time?
7. Do I know how high-quality the sources are? Why do I believe they are high (or low) quality?

When you receive the email in 2012, spend some time thinking through the questions. You may discover that your fears were misplaced. The world didn’t come to an end. You may discover that your hope was a bit overblown. The world didn’t become paradise.

Either way, you’ll discover that you can find ways to improve your decision-making in 2012. That’s a good thing. You will begin to be more nuanced and more thoughtful in your vote, which is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

And why not start now? Campaign 2012 starts in about three weeks…