The merger of Northwest Airlines and Delta is creating the world’s largest airline, under the Delta brand. It would seem opportune to become the world’s finest airline brand, but that’s clearly not happening… and it’s not a failure of the graphics. In fact, the marketing folks are doing an amazingly smooth and rapid graphic transition with signage, plane painting, uniforms, etc.

Here’s the problem. Perhaps an airline’s most powerful tool for brand building are its PEOPLE. The gate agents and flight crews and all those newly re-uniformed staff are the first face of the world’s largest airline, and they are pummeling the brand. I can’t tell you how many recent occasions I have experienced those brand ambassadors disparaging their company brand. “I don’t know when ______ will change over, this whole thing is a mess.” Or “I have no idea why _______ is the way it is, but everything is in chaos right now.” And those are just the softer slams.

Did no one think that a major brand transition might require some pretty robust training and motivating and incentivizing of the people who would be on the front lines? No one in the new HQ in Minneapolis — or the old one in Atlanta — seems to have succeeded in creating a battalion of brand ambassadors to say positive things to customers, to act like they feel great about being part of the world’s largest airlines. Instead, those employees are doing daily damage to the brand that will require mountains of marketing moo-la to fix down the line.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of marketing in major corporations. All this talk of brand building, and so little success.

David Sibbet, said to be the father of graphic facilitation, says we should take seriously the much-used phrase, “I see what you mean.”

Think about what it means to say, “I see what you mean.” Do you see it, mind’s eye and all? If we want others to understand us, do we have to help them “see what we mean?”

Dan Roam wrote the book, The Back of the Napkin. It speaks to and illustrates nicely the challenge of visualizing ideas.

I’m dominantly a word guy, but I also see words as pictures… which is their essence after all. The earliest writing was hieroglyphics, pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a thousand words can also be a picture. Or should at least conjure one.

The 3 ‘Ds’ for today did not come to mind from my son’s end-of-year report card. Otherwise, I’d be doing other things today involving him.

No, the 3 ‘Ds’ on my mind are Drucker, differentiation, and discipline. Peter Drucker, the famed business guru, said: “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” The business landscape has yet to fully grasp that truth, and is even further from living it. Especially in constrained times, like now, marketing can be viewed as less than mission-critical. That proves, in the end, a severe error.

The second ‘D’ is differentiation, again brought to mind by the current challenges of economic pressure. There is nothing like sameness to dissuade a customer, a client or any potential audience. Differentiation from your competition is perhaps the most fundamental element of brand building. Consider any product or service category for a moment, and I suspect you can easily identify the brand or brands of distinction. Differentiation always wins.

The final ‘D’ idea is discipline, but not the sort that is associated with my son’s report card or that other ‘D’ word… detention. This discipline is of the sort addressed by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders. It’s the sort of discipline that enables companies to stay focused, to stay “on strategy.” Again, challenging times create the tantalizing temptation to forget the basics and flail about, to just try things hoping they might work. Unfortunately, that’s like playing the lottery, the odds just aren’t that good… and no one associates gambling with discipline.

In his latest book, Grown Up Digital, Don Tapscott nicely illuminates how the net/next generation sees the world, and will shape the world.

This very topic, for some, is an opportunity to rant at change and to lament the passing of the “good old days.” Instead, Tapscott provides a balanced and thoughtful assessment, and he concludes that it’s an extremely exciting time to be in the world, and in the world of work. After all, if this net/next generation wants to create of culture that is characterized by interaction, collaboration, and enablement (as they surely seem to want to do), we should be grateful and eager to embrace that new culture.

I am regularly reminded that the great opportunity before us is to preserve what is truly valuable from the past, but to integrate it with the new and next ideas that are often advanced by those younger and newer than me. My experience still truly matters, but it will matter most when it embraces what is perched on the horizons of what is yet to be.

What a stunningly wonderful time to live and work.