What used to pertain more to geography and directionality is now often the subject of the digital realm… navigation. As in, the structuring of information so audiences can move through it easily and effectively in an electronic format.

The older applications of the term, however, can still teach us truth. Navigating a body of water required sensitivity to the external elements, the currents, and their changing properties. Navigation also required having an intentional direction, a purposeful vision if you will. Finally, navigation required someone to take the responsibility for steering, for integrating information and making decisions. Sounds a lot like courage.

Business today requires navigational skill, and not just for structuring a web site.

In the wake of public acts of ignorance, self-centeredness, and lack of civility (you know who you are), this word shines today… acuity.

It signals a sharpness of thinking, a keen perception. And as a word all by itself, it just seems to elevate the mind and heart.

Perhaps the aspiration of each day ought to be demonstrable acuity… seeing, hearing, thinking, and speaking with a sharp and keen intellect. We all won’t always live up to that, but it remains a noble aspiration.

The quote goes like this:

Sometimes one must leave the familiar to find the essential.

This simple truth is the propelling idea behind an array of life-activities; things like retreats of varying lengths, ropes course experiences, off-site meetings, sabbaticals, etc. We seek to escape the familiarity-breeds-contempt of the day-to-day by changing our surroundings and routines.

It’s an ancient truth… and it abides today.

Here’s a thought… perhaps we don’t have to do big things. Perhaps we can leave the familiar in small ways, just varying our routines and practices and places in slight ways each day as a signal to ourselves that a focus on the essential is life-giving. Try varying a morning routine, driving or walking a new route, re-arranging a workplace or a kitchen, answering the phone differently.

It only matters if these departures from the familiar remind us of what is essential.

While we all cherish clarity, especially when it comes to decision alternatives, the days and challenges regularly present us instead with ambiguity.

Alternatives are mixed and messy, and the pathways ahead are rarely as neatly defined as we would like. However, greatness emerges from those who embrace ambiguity. Some can even thrive on it.

How is it possible to thrive amidst uncertainty and ambiguity? Well, not by being reckless nor by diving into data and looking for that magic answer that’s rarely there.

Thriving on ambiguity means being reflective, thoughtful, and purposeful, even in small ways. In fact, small forward movement is a key strategy in uncertain times. Making incremental steps amidst ambiguity is a wonderfully effective antidote to the paralysis that too often afflicts us when complexity refuses to be simplified.

Embrace ambiguity and refuse to be stymied. You’ll love the rewards.

Dan Roam in his wonderful book, The Back of the Napkin, makes a key distinction. He notes that the opposite of simple is not complex… the true opposite of simple is elaborate.

When it comes to communication, the highest challenge is not to reduce complexity to simplicity. The real key is to embrace complexity and make it understandable. Of course, Roam believes that visual thinking is a central ingredient in that process.

Too frequently, the clamoring for simplicity is really a facile excuse from lazy people to not do the hard work of embracing complexity and then representing it in understandable media and manner of expression… both words and pictures, which are really the same thing.

The best things in life are complex… we insult them by simplification. We honor them, on the other hand, by embracing their complexity and tackling the challenge of communicating their truth with concise clarity and unfettered understandability.

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.