I’ll be heading off to a leadership conference in a few weeks and it got me to thinking about the true common quality of leadership.  I once asked the great management guru Peter Drucker to tell me what he felt was common among all leaders, his response was, ” They all have followers.” His point being that every leaders is unique in his or her own right.

But I have another take on this.

I recall during the hayday of the dotcom boom being at a dinner party were I met someone who was talking up the fact that he was having great success as a day trader in the stock market. He went on and on about how easy it was to make a killing by studying trends and making fast accurate decisions about the market. A few weeks later the dotcom bubble imploded and the market did a free-fall off the vertical side of Half-dome. I wondered how my dinner partner was doing now?

It’s a simple fact of life that we love to take credit for the successes in our lives. We’ve worked hard, done the right things, invested in what we believe and as a result we should take pride in ourselves and the decisions that got us here. I’m guilty and won’t argue that for a minute.

But is it truly our successes that define us, our character, our values, and our beliefs? When life is going our way, when a business is growing, when records are being broken, when relationships thrive, making the right decision is easy. In these times of momentum life lets us get away with many mistakes while we are swept along by the moment. Flying in fair skies we can all be excellent pilots, but fair skies do do teach us much.

When I look at those people I admire most, true leaders, the ones who I see as the bravest and the strongest among us, it is not their success that attracts me but their ability to do the right thing when the skies darken and the storm moves in. The decisions we make when it seems as though the deck is stacked against you, when your business is faltering, when relationships are dying; now that’s what ultimately tells us and the world what we are made of.

We don’t want to accept adversity as an ally, none of us welcome it, or seek it out, and yet  it is our greatest teacher and mentor. It is in the face of adversity that we truly learn the lessons that allow us to make decisions worthy of leadership and worth passing on to our children.

Something to think about during your next trip around the sun.

Answer: You NEVER give up, but occasionally you need to re-evaluate if where you’re going is still where you want to be.

I spent the last few days in Chicago where I flew just to watch the Paul McCartney concert at Wrigley field on Sunday night (and then again on Monday night! hey neither Sir Paul nor I are getting any younger!) with my daughter Mia. At 69 McCartney has defied all the odds. His ability to rock the house was unlike any other concert I’ve been to.

It got me to wondering, as I connected the dots between this incredible concert and something nearly as profound that I’d experienced a few months ago.

I was giving a keynote about the power of never giving up as an entrepreneur to a relatively young audience - now days “relatively young” defines the vast majority of my audiences : ) At the end of the keynote one of these young guns asked me what must have been one of the toughest questions I’d ever had to address from the podium.

“So you talk about perseverance and tenacity but when ‘do’ you give up?” he asked. The answer I gave got me a standing ovation, which took me completely by surprise.

Last night that same answer struck me again.

“You never give up!” - at least not on those things that define who you are, your passion, your beliefs, your values, your faith. Call these what you will but they are the bedrock of who you are and the only real genuine part of you than you can take any measure of deserved pride in.

But not giving up does not mean that you don’t walk away from things. Often life throws curves at us, people, circumstances, events that we simply have no control over. We look at these challenges and cringe, especially those of us to whom giving up is an apparent admittance of failure.

You could say McCartney gave up on the Beatles and you can be pissed at him for doing so. How could he give up on one of the greatest bands of all time?

He didn’t. McCartney walked away as did John, George and Ringo. But he did not give up on his music, he did not give up on his passion, and he certainly did not give up on his love for performing. His values were genuine.

McCartney didn’t think out of the box he created a new box to play in each time he had to move on. As my very astute son once said to me, “Dad if you can’t get out of the box do you just decorate it nicely?” Isn’t that what most of us settle for, nicley decorated boxes that we can’t stand to be in?

Is it a stretch to try and tie this to the greater challenge we all face of making similar decisions about giving up when we are faced with tough circumstances? I don’t believe so.  If we hold true to our values and principles then there is never such as thing as giving up, there are only detours, storms that temporarily toss and tussle our compass.

But staying on course means that you have to know what these values are and you have to live them. You need to find boxes that are worthy of who you are.

So what are the core values that define your life, which you can not negotiate on or relinquish to circumstances, events and the whim (or failings) of others? What are the principles you hold most dear?

The answer to that question in family, business, and every other aspect of our lives is a simple one, and I’ll make it very vivid for you by using the same example I used when that fledgling entrepreneur asked his question about when it’s time to give up.

Imagine yourself at deaths doorstep (sorry for the morbid tone but it’s necessary to make the point). You have minutes left to live and you have to answer a simple question, “what do you regret not having done with your life?”

Few of us will have a clean sheet of paper when making that list, but some will have much shorter lists than others. My suggestion to you is that you write out that list now and study it hard. These are the things you cannot give up on. These are the things that define you and your core values. These are the things that make your life worth living and make you a worthy man or woman. Take that list and staple it to your forehead so that you can see it in the mirror every day.

So what’s your list? What can you not give up on? It’s a much simpler and shorter list than you may imagine.

As for the rest, the stuff that didn’t make the list, just walk away, as hard as it may be, as sad as it may make you, just walk away.

Do that in business and in life and giving up is never an option.

Atlantis set to music Click to see the video set to music

A letter to to my kids on the launch of the last space shuttle STS-135:
“…as I watch this fireball of my childhood’s fantasy burn a hole into the sky, what I realize is that the bar for our collective ambition is not set by what is reasonable and certain but by what is unreasonable and uncertain.”
I grew up in an era when people dared to dream impossible dreams.  We set our sights on something well beyond our reach. We shot for the moon, and we reached it.

I was still four months shy of my third birthday when JFK gave his now famous, then brazen, speech to congress charging the US with the unimaginable task of putting a man on the moon and returning him home safely before the decade was out. I know that for you this is a few pages in your history book.  But to me this was the future. It was a far off dream that represented the hopes, aspirations and fears of nation.

History rarely fits into periods with distinct beginnings and endings, but we like to believe that our lives are marked by specific events in order to simplify the otherwise complex patterns where many economic, political and social dynamics collide in an otherwise chaotic mess. The first era of space exploration is bookended by two of these events; on one side by JFK’s historic quote and on the other side by the launch yesterday of the final space shuttle Atlantis.

For me the image of the Space shuttle flying off into history is one of these neat and tidy bookends; an especially poignant one. You see, I remember a time before the internet, before cable, before color TV (yes, Im THAT old) when I was glued to a small black and white TV, adjusting the rabbit ears to see grainy images of those early adventurous moonwalkers.

It’s difficult to express to you how uncertain all of this space stuff was back then. The risks and the incredible investment that the USA made in manned space missions went well beyond just a casual investment in space exploration. We weren’t just testing the waters. It was a commitment with the words “Moon or Bust” writ large upon our nation’s collective rear window. It was the equivalent of betting your entire career on a home run after one time up at bat. We had to do it, partly to beat the USSR and show our technical and military superiority, but we also had to prove to ourselves that we were capable of reaching whatever we set our sights on.

Today your generation takes the tremendous risk of the space race for granted, in large part because we achieved what  we set out to achieve.  But imagine for a moment that we had not. Imagine that your history books told a story of how in those last few seconds of Eagle’s decent onto the lunar surface Neil Armstrong drained the fuel tanks, tore through the LEM’s paper thin exterior, and made it a one way trip. What if we had never stepped foot on the moon? What if we had just turned back because there was so much more to do back home? How would your expectations of what we can achieve be different today?

The space race was significant not only because of the oft-touted and staggering list of life saving medical technologies, hi-tech devices, and conveniences it brought to us.  It was significant because of the sense of hope and confidence it offered. It’s a reminder that there was a time when could (or at least believed we could) accomplish just about anything we set our sights on. That’s the real legacy of NASA and the first era of the space program. The shuttle is part of that national sense of pride, and for 30 years it has been the most enduring single piece of our 50 year journey into space. You’ve grown up with it the way I grew up with commercial airplanes.  It’s become so much a part of most of our lives that many people much older than you are surprised to hear it’s being retired.

However, as I stood a stones throw away from base of the shuttle on the night before launch and gazed upwards in awe at one of mankind’s most magnificent creations, lit up like a monument to our collective ambition, I couldn’t help but recall the long forgotten pride I felt at watching Apollo rockets take off and Neil Armstrong set foot upon the lunar surface. For those in my generation talk about he shuttle is mostly a nostalgic journey to a place, which, like mist places in the past, we’re stuck in.

On that same night, as I stood with a few hundred members of the press paying homage to the shuttle Florida’s notorious mosquitoes were feasting on us Like locusts on a corn field. You’d take a picture than take swipes at various parts of exposed skin, take another picture and repeat, over and over. It was as though in that moment of awe and wonder something was trying to tell us, “Hey, get over it, stop the adoration of the past. Move on or become food for the future.”

So now it’s your turn to decide how we should, continue to explore space. At a time when the US is struggling with a crushing national debt you’ll have a debate much more intense than the one that my generation had. Why spend so much and risk so much on what’s out there when we have so much to concern ourselves with back here? Why not just let free enterprise do the exploring now that we have figured out the technology and the science?

It’s a valid debate for reasonable profit minded people. I applaud all of the efforts to develop private enterprise for space commerce and tourism and to shift as much of the basics of commercial space travel to private business. But as I walk around the grounds of the Kennedy Space Center and I listen to the stories being told by the many people who are contributing to The Space Crowd, as I talk to the astronauts who have been to space, as I finally watch this fireball of my childhood’s fantasy burn a hole into the sky, what I realize is that the bar for our collective ambition is not set by what is reasonable and certain but by what is unreasonable and uncertain. Which is what many reasonable people leave out of the conversation. We didn’t travel into space to escape our problems on Earth. We did it for the sake of dealing with the enormity of the challenges that we left behind. We cheered for Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins because they gave us hope that we could take on those challenges. We gasped at the tragedy of Apollo I, Apollo XIII, Challenger and Columbia because they symbolized how easily hope can be lost.

If there is one thing you and your generation need in today’s uncertain world it is clearly the belief that you can solve the problems that face you, here on Earth. If I’ve noticed one common attitude among those innovative individuals and organizations who I’ve worked with, it is a firm conviction built on the foundation of a belief that they CAN - despite the background din of “can’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t.” To be simple about it, here are many ways to inch towards space, and I applaud all of those efforts. But there also needs to be a way to occasionally leap.

My advice, “Don’t let the nostalgia of my generation tether you as you decide to make those leaps.”

In many ways the launch of the final shuttle marks the end of my era of possibility. Some call it a post American era. I hope you don’t chose to think in those terms. I don’t. I prefer to look at it as the beginning of your era. An era of global cooperation that will surpass anything we were able to achieve with sheet metal, rivets and rocket fuel. Your raw materials will include so much more, social networking, telepresence, an ability to experience  far off planets, asteroids, and deep space from your laptop or smartphone, and a capacity to innovate in ways I never could have imagined; the power of many  to build beyond what any of my generation’s dreams could have conceived of in our wildest flight of fancy.

Look, I’ll be blunt, my generation has left more than a few problems at your doorstep and there are many more that will come knocking. But I’d like to think we’ve also left you a legacy and a foundation of achievement - a legacy you can look back on and build on while you look forward to the future, a future of infinite possibilities.

The last shuttle may have flown but the real exploration is just beginning. So go ahead shoot beyond the Moon. I don’t know how you will do it, but I know you’re up to it!

The Apollo Generation
How old were you when the first man landed on the moon? If you can answer that question then you are part of the generation that is stuck in the last century of innovation. I’m part of that generation. I call us Apollos, named after the space program that put the first man on the moon. Like the footprints of astronauts that are still, and will be for millennia, etched on the lunar surface many of us are stuck in time. Sure we may have moved on in terms of keeping up with the latest technologies and we have all certainly learned new things, but that’s not what I’m referring to. We are stuck in terms of how we understand the mechanics of innovation.
What if I were to tell you that innovation is, in the words of John Lennon, “What happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” What if innovation was more about dealing with uncertainty than predictability? If you’re an Apollo, does this sit well with you? Probably not. It’s not the way we Apollos have been educated to think. After all the better you can predict the future the better you can tell what needs to be innovated. This is what Drucker meant by working in periods of prolonged predictability. But that only applies if you believe that the future is simply a continuation of the past and somehow the result of only the experiences that you have had to date. It’s not.
When I speak to executives or address large audiences I can instantly spot the Apollos. All I need to do is see the look at their faces when I talk about uncertainty. Apollos like to set an objective for a known problem. They are obsessively objective driven. They hate to invest without a firm and unequivocal objective in mind. No surprise there, it’s they way we learned to approach the biggest challenges of our age. We knew our enemies. In war it was clear who we were fighting against. You were either one of our allies or you were the enemy. In the cold war you were a communist or you were not.  In the space race you either set foot on the moon or you didn’t. You were a flower child or you were “the man.” The world was black and white.

The “Now” Generation
The current generation could care less about the objective. Their joy and passion is in exploring with no definite end in mind. It’s why so many of them put so much time into social networking sites like FaceBook with no definite return. The joy for them is in the social journey, not the destination. It has to be; the world has become a continuous spectrum of gray with few stark contrasts. Terrorism is amorphous and insidious, with no single geographic border or national enemy. Economies are merging in vast global coalitions, sometimes explicitly as is the case with the European Community, in other cases implicitly as is the case with Asia and Latin America.

The Journey from Here
Understanding how innovation is changing and how to build it into our businesses, attitudes, schools and very culture requires rethinking much of what we’ve been taught and have experienced about invention and innovation. We need to look beyond the glitz to the tools, processes, and behaviors that create value through innovation. We need to build the skills of innovation into our children, our organizations and our leaders. Most importantly, we need figure out ways to sustain innovation in order to create enduring value rather than the periodic flash in the pan that has typified innovation to date.
The good news is we have no choice. You need not ponder the call to be more innovative as if it were being posed as a question. Kennedy’s call to action worked because we had no choice. We were willing to endure any pain and pay any price to put a man on the moon. Today’s global challenges are no less demanding, and far too complex to allow us the option of standing still.

We need a new set of rules for innovation – now.

Answer

Not that long ago I always carried a stack of business cards. No more. Just Google me. I don’t care how you spell Koulopoulos, you’ll find me. There is value in that but there is also a price to be paid for being so connected, for being everywhere, and it’s not clear exactly how steep that price will be. Welcome to the Social Economy, a boomtown with apparently limitless boundaries, opportunities and risks.

The Social Economy is more than just new technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter. It redefines things we’ve long taken for granted about how we interact with each other and how we create value. That’s as important to business as it is to each of us personally.  Ultimately we are all going to have to adopt social behaviors and strategies that enable us to survive and thrive in this incredibly interconnected world .

Here are just five ways the social economy is redefining how we do business.

1 - Social Influence: Social Marketing is all about influence. Take the recent case of The Huffington Post. Adeptly using the notion of a “network of influencers,” Arianna Huffington was able to give new meaning to term “socialite,” and cash in on a $300 Mill windfall. It’s also worth noting that in the case of the Huffington Post many of its bloggers are suing Huffington for $105Mill since they have been writing for free and get none of the windfall. Like I said, “we’re redefining,” not “we’ve redefined,” the rules!

2 - Social Transparency: Social Business requires transparency, something that can be difficult to accept for many companies. Consider how often you try to protect and conceal the inner workings of your organization from the marketplace, customers, and partners. What if most of that can no longer be concealed? Take a lesson from Jonathan S wartz, Past CEO of Sun Microsystems before its acquisition by Oracle. Jonathan’s blog was open to any and all public opinion - and it wasn’t always pretty, but it was open and it set the tone for the transparency of the entire organization.

3 - Social Time: Social Business is realtime. The immediacy and always-on nature of customers demands a reciprocal approach on the part of every business. Customers will judge your company by how quickly you respond to their needs, complaints, and behaviors. Take for example Comcast, who, like most cable companies,  is still seen by many as the “cable repair guy who wants you to define a two hour window within which you will patiently wait for service. All the more surprising that they have put in place a Twitter handle @comcastcares which is monitored in realtime for customer concerns and complaints. At least I have someone to talk to while I wait for the cable guy.

4 - Social Meaning: Your br and is only as powerful as it is clear on what it stands for.  I buy Apple in part because it’s a better computer. But I also buy Apple because it says something about who I am. What does your brand say about who I am (notice I said “I” not “You”)? What value does it bring to MY life? The era of loyal customers is over. Create a loyal brand that respects my values and supports them.

5 - Social Experience: Even hard-goods manufacturers such as BMW are learning this as they move the experience of driving to mobile devices such as iPods with apps that not only work with their products but also redefine the notion of a driving experience, in and out of the car. This same principle applies to simpler products, especially commoditized products that are difficult to differentiate. While the product may not be distinguishable the experience always is.

2 - The relative income per day around the world. Few surprises here, but striking to watch in animation. Play this one for your kids next time they ask for an extra $20. Click Here to See the Animation

3 - The largest exporter and the largest importer (two separate countries) of computer equipment. You can probably guess who takes the prize for importer, but I’ll bet you won’t guess the largest exporter - unless you’ve traveled there lately!

Like most analytics you can spend days playing with Worldmapper.org but the bottom line is inescapable; we are witnessing one of the most overwhelmingly dramatic socioeconomic shifts to occur in the last 500 years. How it will play itself out is anyone’s guess but chances are it won’t be pretty unless we figure out;

1.  how to replace debt with productivity,
2.  reengineer K-12 to create a new class of problem solvers, and
3. accept that an inter-reliant world is going to require a whole lot more tolerance than a divided one.
Or we can just bury ourselves deeper into the analytics and sit about playing with worldmapper.org until we come to that most elegant and simplistic conclusion, we’re screwed!

Waiting on Innovation
As I waited in line for my iPad 2 (with my iPad 1 at my side so that I could browse the web and check email while I waited) it occurred to me how silly it was to be so dependent on technology that just 12 months ago I was able to completely live without.

The fact is that every time we encounter massive change, such as that brought on by tablets, smart phone, cell phones, laptops, PC’s - take your pick - it’s nearly impossible to fully appreciate the true nature of the change or the way in which it will alter our behaviors. It’s the reason humanity has such a miserable track record of predicting the true impact of innovation and change on the future. Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, is reported to have said that the worldwide market for computers would never exceed five. True or not, this statement always sticks in my mind as great metaphor for how even the most visionary among us are stymied by the unpredictability of the future!

Whether it’s the computer the printing press, the automobile, the cell phone or the iPad we are amazed by our own ability to find applications for new ideas and react to and adapt to change. It is ultimately the most encouraging and optimistic aspect of human nature.

New Behaviors = New Business Models
Part of the reason it is so difficult to project the path of innovation is that big change rarely comes in the form of any single technology. When we try to predict the impact of innovation we are not predicting the trajectory of a cannon ball but the shape of dust storm.  Massive change is accompanied by a context of uncertainty, with so many forces interacting in chaotic ways that they defy any reasonable person’s ability to project how the chaos will evolve. Just ask any of the Wall Street fund managers who had no models developed to run scenarios of the recent recession. You can bet they all do now. But no matter how many scenarios you model there are always many more that you simply cannot anticipate. The unknown is called the unknown for a reason!

What has changed on Wall Street is also what has changed whenever we react to any new disruptive technology - in a word, behavior.

Behavior is the unknowable variable in every innovation, and it is the variable that most determines the opportunity for a new business model to evolve and to take advantage of the new behavior.

It’s the Business Model, Stupid
We are at the tail end of an era which has focused almost entirely on the innovation of products and services, and we are just at the beginning of a new era that focuses on the innovation of “business models.” This goes beyond just asking how we can make what we make better and cheaper, or asking how we can do what we do faster. It is about asking why we do it to begin with.  When Apple created iTunes it didn’t just create a faster, cheaper, better digital format for music it altered the very nature of the relationship between music and people. e-bay did not just create a market for auctions, it changed the way in which we look at the very experience of shopping and how community plays a role in the experience. When GM created Onstar it didn’t just make getting form point A to point B faster, it changed the relationship between auto manufacturer and buyer and fundamental altered the reason we buy a car. All of these are examples of innovations in behavior that lead to entirely new business models.

By the same token Dell did not create personal computers, it radically changed the business model for the way we build and buy them. Google did note invent Internet search, there were nearly 50 software vendors delivering Internet-based search, some for as long as 25 years before Google! Google changed the way we interact with the Internet allowing advertisers find and pay for buyers in a way that was inconceivable prior to Google. Again these are all examples of business model innovation. Yet we continue to be obsessed with technology innovation. To paraphrase Jim Carville’s once again popular political pun, “It’s not the technology, it’s the business model, stupid.”

The greatest shift in the way we view innovation will be that the innovation of our business models will need to be as continuous a process as the innovation of products has been over the last hundred years.   It’s here that the greatest payback and value of innovation has yet to be fully understood and exploited.

Unfortunately far too many of us are still stuck in an old model of innovation - just a surely as we are stuck in line waiting to take part in the new one.

I’ve been an Apple guy since the very first Mac Classic - in fact if I had every mac I’d ever owned I could open a museum! My whole company, Delphi, was mac based. We must have had hundreds in every conceivable configuration. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to share the stage with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who I interviewed for the BICSI event in Orlando a few weeks back. I had spoke with Woz months before the event to set things up and then had diner with him the night before our session.

See more photos of my interview with Woz here

The man is as genuinely passionate about technology as anyone I’ve ever met. He is an engineer through and through. But what’s really fun about Woz is his ability to take it all in stride. Hanging with him was sort of like being with a rock star. Were ever we were a mob would gather round him. ANd being the consumate prankster he was full of small surprises. For example, when he checked into his hotel room he gave the bellhop a tip of 2 dollar bills, uncut on a single sheet. He joked with him that he had just perfected the art of printing money and these would for sure pass for the real thing. The bell hop could care less. He just had Woz sign his sheet of bills. I can tell you the’ll never be used to buy anything.

During my interview with Woz we talked about they early days at Apple, it’s near death experience at the hands of Scully, it’s rebirth, his relationship with Jobs and continued employment at Apple - yes he still gets a paycheck, albeit the smallest on the payroll, according to him.

The most important messages he delivered were about the value of simplification. He recounted how he and Jobs, particularly, were absolute maniacs about keeping things simple, that technology should be art as much as it is machine. Tell me you don’t see that in the iPad today. It’s an important lesson to take to heart in today’s “make it ever more complex” world of tech innovation.

After our session Woz stuck around to hold court with a few dozen of his closest disciples from the audience. While most celebs of his status would take the backstage exit to a waiting car he instead reveled in nearly an hour of banter with folks. Each one got Woz to sign something Apple - an iPad, iPod, or iPhone. And yes, I have no shame, he did sign my iPad - I guess that one isn’t going on eBay when I upgrade in a few months.

Every so often you come across people who are genuinely interested in passing it on. Folks who are just not full of themselves, although they could easily get away with it, and like to have fun being with other people just to share what they know, without preaching what they know. My mentor Peter Drucker was the same way. We can learn a great deal from those people about humility and the satisfaction of giving back a little bit of the knowledge we’ve accumulated, and in the process making others feel a little better about themselves.

See more photos of my interview with Woz here

—–

When you travel as much as I do life becomes a series of departures and destinations.

Destinations are funny things. We all look forward to destinations as testimonials that we are making progress, achieving something in the process of getting from where we were to where we are going. But every destination starts with a departure, the end of something we’ve left behind. Sometimes that’s a good thing other times not. But in every case it’s departures that put us in motion. Sometimes we choose these departures other times (perhaps most times) they are chosen for us. In either case these are things that, like it or not, give us a chance to shape who we are. A departure forces you to think outside of your comfort zone, to stretch your imagination, patience, and creativity. Departures create anticipation and anxiety, but they also create opportunities we likely had never imagined.

So what departures shaped you most in 2010? Yes, I know, forget about 2010, it’s 2011, a New Year and new clean sheet of paper. Sure, it’s clean, if you were born at 12:01 am January 1st 2011, but you’re just a little bit older than that.

Were you shaped by the economic upheaval, were you laid off, did you depart a job or a career, did your family situation change? Go ahead make the list of all the departures that shaped you.

Now look at that list, look at it closely, and answer two simple questions:

Question #1) How many of the departures on your list were ones that you orchestrated, that you had full control over, that YOU decided on?

Not that many right? It seems that what shapes us most is not our brilliance, our great ability to predict and plan for the future, or our success. All of these tie us to the past and prevent us from seeing new possibilities. It reminds me of an experiment I once heard about where two large glass jars, one filled with bees and one with flies, were placed directly in front of a light. Then the tops of the jars were opened. The bees, being much smarter, flew towards the light, constantly smashing into the glass. Eventually they all died, in the open jar. The flies, being far less intelligent and much more random in their flight patterns all escaped the jar.

I haven’t a clue as to the merits of the experiment but I do know that the uncertainty which looms so large in our lives often opens lids and doors we don’t know to look for. I see it happen in my work with F500 companies, I see it in my mentoring of entrepreneurs, and I see it in my own life. Sure, we all have those things that we choose to do to shape ourselves, departing from bad habits to start a workout routine, leaving a bad  job or a caustic relationship - all those collective New Year’s resolutions that we so faithfully expect to follow through on (at least for today).

But even most of these and all of those things that truly shape a life and define our trajectory through this world; success, love, happiness, sadness, are most often triggered by what we can’t expect. But I said there was a second questions, and this is the one thing we all need to keep in mind as we head into 2011:

Question #2) For each of those departures did you choose a better destination?

This is the part we can control.  Great business, great people, are always looking for the unexpected destinations. If there is a single quality that is most needed to innovate and succeed it is this almost naive ability to embrace the uncertain by constantly learning how to take new directions from it.

And that leads me to my New Year’s resolution for 2012, that’s right I’m skipping a year. 2011 and however many more years I have to stay in motion:

“Embrace uncertainty, learn the lessons it has to teach, look for the possibilities I never could have imagined on my own, and make sure that for every departure life sends my way, I find an even better destination.”

Happy 2011, wherever it takes you! - tk