When you look at other industries and companies for “best practices,” don’t restrict yourself just to your work environment. Steve always likes to say that the secret to raising his sons was that one day he came across a horse training manual. “I took away two key lessons that I used while the boys were young. 1: If you don’t run them twice a day, they’ll kick the barn down and 2: The secret is in how tight (they buck) or loose (you lose control) you hold the reins.” What best practices have you discovered?

Paul was quoted by the BBC recently on advertising and pester power. The old belief is that advertising has created or has fostered nagging children. In truth, bad parenting enables pestering kids. Set limits and kids will respect them. Sure, they’ll push back from time to time, but they don’t learn that bad behavior just from watching television.

Around the country we’ve spoken to lots of groups and organizations who are hiring Millennials. Many of these 40-something employers are completely perplexed and frustrated by their new Gen-Y workers (also called the ME generation). To manage them properly, you’ve got to give them enough rope to hang themselves-without hanging yourself. You’ll survive. They’ll learn from it. And your business will be better for it.

More and more, consumers are using retail stores to do some free sampling before going home, going on line and ordering the item on the Internet. It started with big box electronic stores, then bookstores-and pretty soon it will be every kind of retail store. If you’re in the retail business, you’d better start thinking about a different business model for the digital age. You need to be selling “reason to appear” rather than “sample showroom for online selling.” As Satchel Paige used to say, “Don’t look back-something might be gaining.”

Our partner, Norman Siegel, is an award-winning art director with over a half-dozen commercials in the Paley Center collection (and his aviation art continuing to win awards). His edgy sense of humor constantly reminds us what he thinks of our “edits.” The other day, we asked him to “remove the hyphen at the end of a line and don’t break the word.” Sure enough, we got back a layout with “market-ing” (on two lines) replaced with “market ing” (on two lines). Remember, art directors care most about how good the work looks, not how perfectly detailed the spelling and punctuation are. How good are you at giving clear and complete direction to visual people?

With the school term wrapping up, Paul asked his Spanish and French students in his International Advertising Class what struck them most about living in NYC this semester. First they said, “The subway.” Paul thought they were going to praise the system’s 24/7 schedule. Their observation was how decrepit and dirty it is. As if that wasn’t depressing enough, their second observation was about the large number of rats they observed on our streets at night. Seems like our face to the world needs a significant facelift. What do you do every day to extend your best face?