Market research is frequently a part of the mix of activities I’ll tackle for client projects, and often with considerable caution.

Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks and now its returned CEO, says:

I despise research. I think it’s a crutch.

I usually like agreeing with Mr. Schultz, but I don’t despise research. His extreme statement serves, however, to expose the danger of misusing market research.

If market research is nothing more than listening to the marketplace, aggregating the messages and sentiments, and giving the market what it seems to want, then that sort of research should be despised. It leads to product parity, at best.

If, on the other hand, research is listening to the marketplace, carefully and insightfully analyzing their pulse and pressure points, and then creatively and imaginatively uncovering unmet and even unarticulated needs, well that sort of market research is a powerful tool.

It’s the seeds of innovation, really.

Our friends at Nike teach us about two very important things:  being green and marketing green.

Nike has made significant efforts to be a company that is environmentally responsible… from making the soles of the Air Jordan with recycled bits of old sneakers to refusing to buy and use hides from deforested areas of the Amazon, to name just a couple of examples.

But Nike doesn’t rely heavily on their green commitments in their marketing and brand positioning. Why? Largely because they know their customer and they are disciplined about their brand. They understand that the Nike brand stands fundamentally for ‘cool’ and ‘high-performance.’ Being green is not part of the primary equation. In fact, focusing on environmental practices might interfere with their hip and high-performance persona. So no matter how strong their sustainability story, or no matter how pressing it seems today to shout out a green story, Nike is disciplined about their brand.

Nike is all the while striving to be a good environmental citizen… they’re just not letting it drive an otherwise highly refined brand strategy. Now there’s a lesson.

In these challenging times for all sectors of business, this quote seems particularly pertinent:

Brands are built over years, so they can’t be managed over fiscal quarters.

I don’t have the source for that quote, but I return to it regularly as a validation for counseling clients on persistence. It is wildly tempting to knee-jerk the management of a brand, but that impulse is too often a brand’s undoing.

So the next time some segment of your organization champions a reactive brand move based mainly on last quarter’s numbers, trot out this truism and advocate with all the passion you can muster for persistence in brand building.

There are some who predict that rapidly advancing technology will completely displace — or at least totally transform — our current system of education. After all, we now have nearly instant access to far more information than ever before in history, and the recent explosion of social media technology has the potential to create interactions that could, in the view of some, completely eliminate the need for schools, universities, and formal educational programming.

We do well to remember that the word “university” from the Latin universitas means community of learners, or a sort of guild of scholarship. It doesn’t mean institution or campus or program. Learning will happen not merely through the dissemination of information via amazingly robust distributive technology, nor will learning necessarily happen through the too-often pedestrian and shared ignorance of Facebook and Twitter. Real learning will happen within communities of impassioned teachers and learners, no matter how they are assembled, physically or digitally or both.

True university.

Now, let’s start designing what those universities might look like.

The current and charged debate about healthcare for our nation is a stunning example of the significant power of fear. Using misinformation to engender fear, the rational discussion of issues and options and approaches is disappearing from the public dialogue too quickly. In its place we have name-calling, screaming, and adults behaving as adolescents. It seems to take so little to ignite the power of fear, and its fanned flames are more often destructive than purifying.

The same can be true — on a less emotionally changed stage — in business. The current economic challenges and constrictions demand that business leaders overcome any fear of risk or failure. These days, fear of failure is too often greater than the desire to succeed.

Success won’t come through mediocrity.

Business leaders will need to muster the vision and courage to overcome fear, take strategic risks, and passionately pursue success.

Fanning flames of fear is our greatest enemy.