If I had 1% of the creative craft people like this have, I think I could go places.

Greenpeace: Voices of change. Shot on Canon 5dmkII by Philip Bloom.

That’s because Skype breaks the century-old social contract of the phone: we pay close attention while we’re talking and zone out while you are. As soon as you begin to talk, I feel trapped and desperately scan the room for tasks I can do to justify the enormous waste of time that is your talking. I wash dishes, I file receipts, I read news sites, I make little fake suicide faces to my wife Cassandra about how much I want to hang up that cause her to yell “Joel, I need you now” in a really unconvincing way that I’ve asked her not to do, but I still can’t stop making the suicide faces. In desperate times, when I am on my cell phone in the middle of nowhere, I will pace. The only other time I pace is when I stub a toe or burn myself. But when I start talking, I assume that you are sitting perfectly still, rapt.

I think Joel is on to something here, and it doesn’t just apply to video chat. In our pursuit of real and virtual connectedness, it appears we’ve also figured out how to never really be present. “We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it.”

• I like watching movies/shows online, making appointment television a thing of the past.
• I like online education because I can pace myself according to my learning style, eliminating the need to wait for or burden the rest of the class.
• I like text messaging because I don’t have to type out long emails or make small-talk phone calls.
• I like ordering things from Amazon because it means I can avoid the hassle of traffic, people and lines at the store.
• I like email because it allows me to communicate when I want to.

But I worry that this ability to avoid real time, to create a sense of self control, might be hijacking us from what really matters. The ability to control our own time certainly affords greater flexibility for accomplishing more, but at what expense?

I’ve been a fan of 60 Minutes for many years. Growing up, I remember my dad watching it every Sunday evening as it was the only official night of the week where everybody had to fend for themselves when it came to dinner. (Dad did all the cooking in our house of eight.)

I realize I’m the odd man out with my generation for liking 60 Minutes, but I think I’m the odd man out for a lot of things. I digress.

Learning about the man behind the show was quite a treat. I also couldn’t stop thinking about Neil Postman’s criticism about why television is killing us. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eye-Witness News and Sesame Street are.”

Admittedly, 60 Minutes is entertainment first and news second. Hewitt’s goal was to combine the two so that more people would be captivated by the stories.

It seems like everyone is talking about story these days. Don Hewitt was famous for four words that he said all the time. He said it to aspiring interns and he said it to his staff: “Tell me a story.”

Hewitt was also adamant about steering clear of the “issues.” He didn’t want to do stories about issues. He did stories about people. The issues would surface so long as people were the subject.

Tell me a story.

If I give you five dollars with the promise that you’ll turn it into ten, the most I’m out is five bucks if you squander it. But the most I gain is five bucks if you managed it properly.

When it comes to putting your life on the line for something, the stakes must be pretty high. If the potential for loss is your life, the potential for gain has to be that much greater.

It’s difficult to compete with someone who is willing to give their life for someone or something.

The only way to really compete with someone who is willing to risk their life would be to risk your life. This is why war is such a powerful tool.

People who are unwilling to sacrifice their lives must accept that the upside of their minimized risk will never be what it could be if they were willing to sacrifice life.

Perhaps this is what Jesus was getting at when he said “If you try to hold on to your life, it will slip through your fingers; if you let go of your life, you’ll keep it” (The Voice).

I wish we spent a lot less time and money trying to avoid death’s greeting, and instead found something actually worth dying for.

They did.
And so did they.

I serve as a board observer (a non-voting role) for a not-so-small nonprofit. During a recent teleconference, the director of finance presented a report detailing the losses from an experimental investment strategy conceived and attempted several years ago. Every time this subject comes up, the board cringes with frustration and awaits the speedy recovery from this ugly black eye. Although the losses are relatively minimal, the lessons are no less so.

I’m encouraged that Drucker’s question was actually considered. “Hey board, we’re not in the business of this [experimental investment strategy]!” Unfortunately, this was lamented after the fact! After the loss. After the failed attempt.

The next time you consider launching or trying something new, ask yourself if it supports the business you’re actually in.

For what it’s worth, you might posses the same skill-set as a competitor, but the business you’re in may be completely different.

All graphic designers are not in the business of selling graphic design. Some exist to provide quick turn-around, others sell their ability to create amazing work for amazingly cheap. And still others are in the business of selling prestige because they command it.

Or consider restaurants. If all restaurants were in the business of selling food, we wouldn’t need so many options. Instead, we have restaurants that sell ambiance, some sell fast-food and some are in the business of selling the freshest ingredients.

There’s a crucial follow-up question to making sure that what you do supports the business you’re in.

“How’s business?”

If this question were asked enough, we’d focus on the desired outcomes of the business we’re in. For those that do not know the desired outcomes, the “How’s business?” question forces those outcomes to be identified. You get what you measure.

Two simple questions.

Never.
Asked.
Enough.

So, what business are you in?
How’s business?

In North America, 65 percent of us spend more time with our computer than with our spouse.

Once you get past feeling like a geek for reading a book about e-mail, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, is everything I needed and nothing I expected. Freeman does a fantastic job of telling the story about the history of communication, pausing along the way to analyze the social and psychological implications for how we communicate. “This book is an attempt to slow things down for a moment so we can look at the enormous shift in time and space e-mail has effected, how e-mail has changed our lives, our culture and workplace, our psychological well-being.”

Reading The Tyranny was a lot like reading an updated version of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death which is also an incriminating and enlightening journey through history, primarily though the lens of television and entertainment.

Here are my highlights from The Tyranny…

Blame Literacy
“In Sweden in the eighteenth century, though, the Lutheran Church issued an injunction that everyone must be able to read the word of God, and a massive literacy campaign was launched. Within a hundred years the nation boasted a 100 percent literacy rate.”

“In the early American colonies, where religious injunction required that believers be able to read the Bible themselves, men had a 100 percent literacy rate.”

“In 1840, the average American sent three letters a year; by 1900 that figure was sixty-nine letters per annum and the total volume of letters outnumbered telegrams fifty to one. By 1950, the mail was almost out of control; in 1960, the U.S. Post Office was handling 63 billion pieces of mail—the equivalent of 350 pieces per year for every man, woman, and child in America.”

“Since most people didn’t send and receive telegrams regularly, the telegraph made the biggest impact in their lives by increasing the scope of the world it brought to them. This new, globalized sense of now would soon test the limits of human empathy. Small-town residents in the United States suddenly found it difficult to put local news into the context of large-scale disasters around the world. One newspaper, the Alpeno Echo in Michigan, defiantly shut down its incoming telegraph service, tired of becoming the world’s echo chamber rather than a record of its own community. ‘It could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia,’ Standage wrote, ‘and not a line about the Muskegon fire.’”

“Communication—the conveyance of meaning from one person to the next—depends on how we frame it.”

E-Mail is Re-Programming Us
“The mind is denied the experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated thinking occurs. We become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as we try to keep up with the computer. The e-mail inbox turns our mental to-do list into a palimpsest—there’s always something new and even more urgent erasing what we originally thought was the day’s priority.”

“As Susan Sontag noted in On Photography, we cannot travel and be tourists without ferrying home images of the place we have visited—as if the purpose of the trip were the collection of the images, not the being there.”

“Thirty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher Guy Debord predicted we would be spending more time apart. ‘The reigning economic system is founded on isolation,’ he wrote. ‘At the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system, as it strives to reinforce the isolation of ‘the lonely crowd.’”

“If we’re performing an action that doesn’t always pay out, but does some of the time, such as playing the slots, the lesson learned is that if we want a reward we need to keep pulling that lever.”

“A work climate that revolves around multitasking and constant interruptions has narrowed our cognitive window down to a core, basic facility: rote, mechanical tasks.”

“This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? Yet in 2006, it was discovered that Americans spent more than half of their life connected to various forms of media. This means we spend more time engaged in media than we do sleeping, more hours plugged in than we log at work. We work in order to have time to watch. We spend more time with our computers than our spouses. We check our e-mail more often than we drink water.”

Freeman argues for a “slow communication movement.”

The Slow Food movement recognized this twenty years ago, when delegates from fifteen countries drafted a manifesto. “In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes,” they wrote. In other words, we may be able to get oranges from Chile and water from Switzerland, but the carbon emissions involved in shipping them to our doorstep so we can enjoy them are destroying our environment and putting local growers and farmers out of business. Communication works the same way. If we spend our evening online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the people we could turn to for solace, humor, and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this.

“It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve been making subtle changes to my “digital” life for the past two years. Most recently, and because of this book, I’ve also altered my e-mail habits pretty significantly. I’m going on two weeks of establishing new rhythms and it’s been really difficult! The results have been well worth it. I’m less hurried, I’m more focused and I’m chipping away at some big tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Three years ago, then 38-year old Nancy Dubuc took over as president of the network and has been breathing new life into an old story ever since. In addition to championing new reality-type shows–she prefers to call reality TV “the next iteration of documentary storytelling”–Dubuc is also behind the forthcoming “America: The Story of Us” and “The People Speak,” a series based on Howard Zinn’s thoroughly incriminating book, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present.

I love it when established organizations take big risks like this. Not only is Nancy Dubac young, she doesn’t have the typical background you’d expect a History president would have. She has a minor in History and “cheerfully confesses she wishes she had paid more attention in class.”

Looks like I’ll be paying more attention to History–and Nancy Dubac–in the future.

Faith Tribes
Last year I read Barna’s The Seven Faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter. Once I got past George’s over-the-top American love-fest, the rest of the book was quite enlightening. It appears George was looking for some sort of angle to write about what Americans believe. Although I might have picked a different angle, he chose to write a book “about the renewal that the United States needs at this moment in history.” “The future of America depends more upon the compassionate engagement with society by devoted Christians than upon their persistent insistence of their moral supremacy.” Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a well-researched easy introduction to the faith tribes that exist in America, this is it. “We need to stop competing, comparing, complaining, and condemning, and we must start cooperating, communicating, collaborating, and contributing. It’s time to stop fighting and start loving. It’s time to stop taking and start giving.”

Master Leaders
George’s latest book, Master Leaders: Revealing Conversations with 30 Leadership Greats is a gem. It’s still got plenty of George: he’s the self-deprecating ringleader of a Green Room stocked with gurus and goodies. Master Leaders is packed with nuggets from some of today’s great leadership thinkers. Although the topics and conversations from the book are not anything new or groundbreaking, it’s novel in the way George brings together disparate points into a steady stream of serendipitous sunshine. It’s all your favorite leadership principles (and principals) under one roof.

A few of my highlights…

“Leaders really are the standard setters as far as values in an organization. The values are the foundation of behavior within an organization and within the development of organizational culture, and it is critical that the senior leaders are the champions of values. And it is just as critical that they are the ones who effectively model what those values are.”

“Never hire anybody you can’t fire.

“I think that every organization and every leader ends up defining success differently because of the peculiarity of their own mission. But there’s got to be fruitfulness in what they were there to do, and it’s got to be done in a way where people have been bettered in the process.

“If organizations get those three components—knowing what their business is, picturing the end result, and ranking values—and communicate them, everybody can understand them. Then, when you put it up on the wall, it has some meaning. And then you put the goals under that and they just come alive. It’s really powerful.”

“You know it’s a core value if you are willing to get punished for it.”

“If a leader is not vulnerable, you can’t and shouldn’t trust him or her. To be a great leader you have to be vulnerable, you have to let people know who you are. Most people do not want to take advantage of a leader who is vulnerable.”

And my favorite, with a nod to the late Peter Drucker, “You get what you measure.”

Some things on my mind as the new year begins…

• Can’t believe a decade has past since 2000. Feels like just yesterday Jamaica and I were standing at the foot of the Eiffel Tower in France, ushering in the new millennium.
• My theory on time passing quicker the older you get… When you’re 5, a year is 20% of your life. When you’re 20, a year is 5% of your life. So the older you get, the less percentage of your life a year actually is, which makes time feel like it’s flying by.
• Love the way Don Miller approaches new year’s resolutions. With a nod to his recent Million Miles, Miller suggests framing goals as stories. Instead of attempting to lose 15 pounds this year, how about running a marathon or hiking a mountain with a friend? It’s inevitable that the training and preparation for a marathon or a mountain will result in losing weight, and the story to get you there is that much more meaningful. I have a running list of life goals, going to see about converting them to stories.
• Finished reading John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. Excellent book. I’ll blog about it soon, including some new rhythms I’m trying out.
• Can’t wait to dive into Daniel Pink’s new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Check out the teaser video.
• For the past two years, Jamaica and I have been memorizing a new book of the Bible. We know Philippians and James. This year we start on 1 John. Memorizing is hard work, but it’s having a major effect on my thoughts and how I filter them. Love it.
• I’m sick of asking the question “What am I going to do with my life?” It’s getting old. I’m hoping for clarity in 2010.
• I think this is going to be a defining year for CFCC. Last year saw a lot of seeds planted, the team assembled and the focus set.

Hello 2010, it’s nice to see you.