After Cannes, I made a six hour drive to Florence to join Susan for six days of "vacation." I put vacation in quotes, because if the home of the Renaissance doesn't get you thinking and refresh your mind in at least a quasi-professional way, I don't know what will. (To be sure, try as one might, one's thinking may be made a bit sluggish by the Constant Carb Assaults.)

I'm sure a passel of readers with art history degrees (surely we have at least one such reader, eh?) could do justice to the art and cathedrals—but not me. I was on a 6-day "shock & awe" junket, though it was hardly my first visit to Florence. "Shock & Awe"? Yes, it was simply and literally overwhelming; e.g., the magnificent Uffizi gallery, a solid candidate for "world's best." (I left it emotionally drained.)

But as the bankers were bashed at home last week, the story in 14th century Florence was also of bankers, in many cases offending sensibilities to the point that they were offed. Florence is home to the Renaissance and home to the de Medici's, who dominated the commercial sphere in a way that makes today's finance gang look lightweight—both in terms of influence and wretched excess. The de Medicis also commissioned much of the art, wonderful indeed, world-changing beyond a shadow of doubt—but, like today, much of it for their exclusive use. (They also more or less bought the Papacy upon occasion.) (NB: In the same vein, one of Bach's patrons had him imprisoned—another burned some of his music. Ah, the volatile moods of the super-rich!)

"All this" also made me think of globalization, which was also very much alive and very much in good health, save a bloody war here and there and there and here, during the Renaissance-de Medici epoch. Among other things, those thoughts led me to resurrect a marvelous quote from a 2008 article by Peter Jones and Lionel Casson in the Spectator, titled "For Real Globalization, Look at Ancient Rome":

"There is nothing new about a global world. We were living in one 2,000 years ago. ... The Roman in the street ate bread baked with wheat grown in North Africa or Egypt, and fish that had been caught and dried near Gibraltar, He cooked with North African oil in pots and pans of cooper mined in Spain, ate off dishes fired in French kilns, drank wine from Spain or France. ... The Roman of wealth dressed in garments of wool from Miletus or linen from Egypt; his wife wore silks from China, adorned herself with diamonds and pearls from India, and made up with cosmetics from South Arabia. ... He lived in a house whose walls were covered with colored marble veneer quarried in Asia Minor; his furniture was of Indian ebony or teak inlaid with African ivory."

The more things change ...

But, uh, none of the above is about why this Post is titled "Mea Culpa"!

The "mea culpa" refers to my absorbing "distraction" (attraction) during the trip. Namely, Twitter. First, I like Twitter as a communication tool, though I plead guilty as charged by some in terms of mostly using it as a one-way communication vehicle—no small sin. Second, I find the 140-character limit a magnificent challenge! I am in the "beginner's mind" mode—and I am definitely learning anew that "practice makes better," or so I assume and hope. I believe that one can have a full-scale "opinion piece" on a serious topic that occupies 140 characters or less. Hence, I am choosing mostly to use Twitter as a straightforward opinion registry, and am leaving the mega-link practice to many many many others. In short, there are a host of things I really really give a shit about—I've been saying my piece in as many settings as possible for over 35 years, and I'm not inclined to stop; as I recently tweeted, my "live stuff" has absorbed about 5 or 6 million miles and about 9,000 flight legs since 1973.

I love our Friends & Family here at tompeters.com, but am a linear focuser more than a multi-tasker, so Twitter-Am-Mostly-Me at the moment.

Out of possibly zillions, here's a selection of lists and suggestions for how to survive and thrive in 2010:
• Twelve Resolutions on How to be a Mensch, by Bruna Martinuzzi
• Ten Things I Know for 2010, from Ian Sanders
• How to Take Advantage of Social Media in Your Email Marketing from American Express Open Forum
• Ten Practical Tips for Saving Money on Travel from the New York Times

Cool Friend Andrea Learned sent us this trend prediction for 2010: Sustainability Communication.

Lots of fun, this one came to us in the emails. Out of the box (not to say out of control) ideas for consulting at BBC.co.uk: Listen to Peter Day's interview with Neil Mullarkey on comedy and Peter Cook on rock 'n roll. Or use this link.

Also from the emails, a unique idea: Jingle-a-Day for a year.

And finally, "Hire My Friend" is a free application on Facebook that allows you to promote your job-seeker friends within your friend network by announcing their candidacy in your Live/News feed, and placing an information box about them on your profile. Or, become a fan of "Hire My Friend."

There have been no more than a few days respite for six rather grueling months—including a 2-week August "vacation" in New Zealand during which I edited (re-wrote) from more or less 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. each and every day. (Total number of hikes: 0.)

It's been worth it, alas, even the rudeness. Which is not to say the book is worth a damn. It may well not be worth a damn, but it is always worth infinite effort, to one's limits, to try and make something that allows one to occasionally say, "Not bad." At this point, with my work (and that of Erik, Cathy, Shelley) more or less done, I'm going through that horrendous phase when I am powerless—and yet am certain I have produced a pile of crap.

We shall see.

But, again my apologies for behavior that, though beyond my control (no kidding—book writing is for me a garden-variety addiction), is still shameful!

The new book, The Little BIG Things, due out on 9 March, is based on the blog, and was supposed to be mostly done when we started!

Ha!

The last few days, Erik and Cathy and Shelley and I have been going over the manuscript yet again—probably about major revision #7 (??). But now we're done.

(For now.)

Tom pointed us to this article in the Wall Street Journal, "Temporary Workers and the 21st Century Economy," by Jody Greenstone Miller. It foresees a world where most people have several part-time jobs rather than one for 40 (plus) hours every week. A new book to appear in the U.S. in January, And What Do You Do? names this trend: Portfolio Careers. The British authors Katie Ledger and Barrie Hopson offer practical tools to help you determine if you are suited to this grab-bag approach to work and what types of work you'd prefer. Read more at their website, PortfolioCareers.net. [Full disclosure: Katie Ledger is the wife of one of our UK consultants, David Pilbeam, but the coincidence of its timing in step with Tom's noticing the article on the same subject was too much for me to ignore. Besides, I liked the book.]

We normally don't promote events. But for all the visual thinkers in our audience who might be able to make their way to San Francisco in March, you really shouldn't miss Cool Friend Dan Roam's two day seminar. Not only is he a talented guy (read: you'll learn a lot), but he's a lot of fun to spend time with.

We love this story in the Financial Times, "Room to Read's results in Sri Lanka." It's about children who love books, and the success of the program founded by Cool Friend John Wood in bringing the two together.

Joy Stauber, the designer responsible for the fantastic banners at tompeters.com (watch for a new one on Monday, the first day of winter), has a manifesto up at ChangeThis: Brands Are People Too. The point being that "however a brand is born [invariably started by people], it has to have a personality that people connect to." Yes!

"Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in the grateful and appreciating heart."—Henry Clay

It strikes me that Mr. Clay's remark also works particularly well for a Thanksgiving post in the midst of, for many, a very tough year.

When I got back from my Angola-Saudi Arabia-Dubai-Ecuador-India-Etc. marathon, I tweeted about the fact that my greatest thrill (yes, thrill) was the Unmitigated Joy of the Ordinary: doing my laundry, chatting with neighbors at nearby Mach's Market, working through Susan's T'giving shopping list, and, yes, washing the dinner dishes (I don't use the dishwasher—I like the therapeutic part of hand washing).

I am not soft-peddling the loss of a job or a major reduction in hours or the like. Nonetheless, what we pretty much all do have is the opportunity to be thoughtful to others—to offer up "courtesies of a small and trivial character."

Add these kindred quotes to the "keeper" list:

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble."—Helen Keller

"We do no great things, only small things with great love."—Mother Teresa

So how about dedicating Thanksgiving 2009 to purposefully Practicing Courtesies of a Small and Trivial Character?

(I started out this Wednesday by sending "Happy Thanksgiving" emails of no more than a few lines in length to about 80 or 90 people.) (As usual, the responses are pretty amazing—so much so that it almost makes the drill feel self-serving.) (Speaking of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I just read that the pilgrim fathers and mothers preceded Thanksgiving by a fast day. I think that is a marvelous idea. Alas, I read the article after breakfast on Wednesday. But next year ...)

At any rate, Happy Thanksgiving. And, as always, my deepest gratitude to our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines away from home, and in many cases in harm's way, on this November 26th.

On a recent Marketplace, Charles Handy advocated for becoming a Free Agent.

BusinessWeek's feature of ski company K2's design and innovation process teaches an important lesson on focusing on the user of your product. Hat tip to Cool Friend Matthew May.

The latest manifestos have been posted at ChangeThis. Our suggestion is to check out "The Upstarts Are Here!: What Can You Possibly Learn from Entrepreneurs in Their Twenties? Plenty" by Donna Fenn.

Cool Friend Andrea Learned predicts how current trends will change how we do business in "Bridging Gender, Consumer Behavior & Social Responsibility."

We enjoyed Ian Sanders' post "Five Big Lessons from Small Shop Keepers," not because he mentioned Tom, but because the five lessons are right on the money.

Tom spoke in Angola last month. Since we don't hear much from an African perspective on this blog, we thought you'd enjoy this blog post from someone who heard Tom speak at that event.

Through the generations, how war is fought has changed so drastically. One thing that remains the same is what defines a Veteran. Courage, selflessness, and loyalty are a few very small words that barely begin to describe the incredible individual that offers so much to so many, expecting nothing in return. They believe in the ideal that the United States of America is greater than the individual and they are willing to—ultimately—give everything to uphold that ideal. Separation from family and friends, and to live inside a war zone are commitments they have made and stand by.

Ask yourself before just appreciating yet another federal holiday, would you be willing to do what they have done? Willing to miss the birth of your child, miss the burial of a family member, experience intermittent sleep for days on end, hope for at least one meal today, see a friend die with the fear that it could happen again tomorrow and the possibility of the sacrifice of your own life?

Saying thank you hardly seems good enough, but THANK YOU. Thank you to all the Veterans, past and present, who have protected my rights, my freedoms, those that I love and allow me to live the life of a free man. Never forget that the courage of those brave soldiers that have served in our armed forces allows life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without our armed forces, these would not be certainties of our everyday life.

Today is a day of gratitude, but it is also a day of mourning. It is the very least we can offer to our countrymen who, without knowing us, stood up to protect us. Remember those that came home and those that couldn't. Veterans, my sincerest and most humble appreciation is yours. Thank you.

Oh for God's sake.

Behavioral economics?
Translation?

Psychology!

(Or as I like to call the field, "Economists discover humans.")

But that's actually not the topic of this post.

As I write I sit in a beautiful British Airways Club Class lounge in Heathrow's opulent Terminal 5.

The lounge is big.
The lounge is well appointed.
There are two parts.
There is no distinction between the two parts in terms of access.
The "half" you come into has the food and drink, and the loos.
The other half has no amenities aside from a flight info screen.
The two halves are separated by a glass wall, with a simple door.
Push the door and, voilà, go from one half to the other.
(No signs, no labels, no designations at all.)

Punchline:

The half you enter, now, at 10 a.m., has a ratio of approximately (I counted but may be off a bit) three full seats to every entry seat—it is obviously "crowded."

The other half has a ratio of 6 empty seats to every full seat! (And ... the space between rows of seats is much greater.)

The simple (and totally transparent) dividing wall did it!
Three-to-one versus one-to-six.

Maybe the folks in the entry side like crowds? Not likely, since you see new entrants apparently looking for places with more privacy.

Maybe it's no food and drink? Nope, the food and drink area is just as close to me, in the nearly empty side, as it is for those on the entry side; there just happens to be a door in the middle.

Etc.

That is, there's no "sensible" explanation for the radically greater share of free space on "my side" other than something like the assumption, "It's on the 'far side' of the wall—I don't belong there."

The fun (and seriousness) of the nudge-behavioral economics-psychology "thing" is that the differences, like this one in the BA lounge, are often as not extreme. Not a ten percent difference. Or a twenty-five percent difference. (Which would, in fact, be a damn big deal.) But a 180+ degree flip: 3:1 vs. 1:6.

I could go on and on!
I love this stuff!
(Human psychology, that is—I'm not too keen on economics.)

Let me conclude with one pragmatic point: If you become a "nudgist" and a practitioner of "nudgery," the good news is that you don't have to be a Big Boss. These are, in 9 cases out of 10, "below the radar" phenomena. That is, most are unaware of the behavioral consequences of little nudges—and hence anybody at any level who takes the initiative is effectively allowed to play.

Bottom bottom line: This is very-wildly-insanely powerful stuff!!

ABC's Nightline featured Cool Friend Dan Coyle and his book, The Talent Code. Watch it and learn about talent training hotbeds.

Will you accept nothing short of being passionate about your work? This article continues the debate over the importance of happiness at work.

Cool Friend Rosabeth Moss Kanter has a new book out called SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good in which she highlights that doing good and making money do not have to be mutually exclusive.

We can always count on Cool Friend Dan Pink to provide us with fascinating facts, but this one really stood out: "A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place."

Need new marketing ideas? Michele Miller at WonderBranding recommends three new blogs to add to your feeds.

Cool Friend Rowan Gibson also mentioned Tom in a post about innovation.

There's an interesting debate over national academic standards at the New York Times' site.

Cool Friend Deborah Tannen's first book was You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Now she's writing about what may be an even tougher conversational path to navigate, families, in her new book, You Were Always Mom's Favorite.

Bruna Martinuzzi has added her voice to the chorus calling for integrity in leadership with her new book The Leader as a Mensch. The Globe and Mail gives a brief synopsis of the book.

Too much of a good thing? Crowdsourcing comes to recipes and chaos reigns.

Frequent commenter Ian Sanders interviews Cool Friend Kevin Roberts.

In other Cool Friend news, David Weinberger's most recent book is Everything Is Miscellaneous, and he talks about it with Susan Bratton at PersonalLifeMedia.

Sounds like our kind of play! Scribblenauts: Your Vocabulary Controls the Game.

Teenagers don't use Twitter ... their parents do.

And a corollary observation: Mothers Use Facebook, Twitter, Blogs More than Average Adults. "According to the study, nine out of ten (93.6%) mothers regularly or occasionally seek the advice of others before buying a service or product. Additionally, no less than 97.2% said they give advice to others about those products or services they purchased."

Are economic conditions controlled by public perception?

"The Good Enough Revolution," where the low end is the space to conquer.

A macroblogging trend? Check out Woofer, it's the anti-Twitter that requires you to use 1,400 characters.

Kimberly-Clark is taking the aging boomer market very seriously. This Wall Street Journal piece describes how they're putting themselves in the shoes of their customers.

Want happiness? Be your own boss. [via Daniel Pink]

BusinessWeek has an in depth piece on Starbucks' Howard Schultz. Not only does he still visit 25 stores a week, but he prefers the feedback he gets that way to focus groups' input, regardless of the mega-scale of the business he runs now. The piece also covers how the new concept store began, by asking a few employees how they'd compete with Starbucks.

800-CEO-READ lauched myfavoritebizbook.com after Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten published The 100 Best Business Books of All Time so that people could weigh in with their own favorites. Their new ebook includes a submission by our very own Cathy Mosca.

Addicted to checking your RSS Feeds/Facebook/Twitter? Turns out, our brains are hardwired for this. Find out more about it in "Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous."

A short, online documentary coming out in September, Lemonade tells the stories of advertising creatives and what they did after losing their jobs.

"Why Be an Ethical Company? They're Stronger and Last Longer." Enough said.

Think you've lost your chance for entrepreneurial magic if you're over 30? Think again. Read about the results of a new Kauffman Foundation study in "The entrepreneur whiz kid myth: What does the average entrepreneur look like? A 40-year-old cubicle refugee."

And to wrap things up, if you're wandering around Heathrow this week, you may spot Alain de Botton, Heathrow's writer in residence.

Tom has enthusiastically endorsed Bob Stone's new book, The Ethics Challenge: Strengthening Your Integrity in a Greedy World. According to Tom, "your professional and family life alike literally depend on" reading this book. Let us hear what you think of the book.

This article on Diane von Furstenburg's secrets to surviving a downturn is worth a read. (Point of interest: her staff is 97 percent women. "'[T]he only men there are drivers and waiters.'")

Find out why women are better managers from Carol Smith, SVP and Chief Brand Officer for the Elle Group.

For insights into marketing to women, don't miss the book excerpt from Why She Buys in the Wall Street Journal.

The topic of healthcare has been ubiquitous in recent weeks. Here's the story of an interesting approach to the issue: "Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida has opened an Apple Store-style outlet that offers health-insurance services. Could it be coming to a mall near you?"

On a lighter note, the Boston Globe recently profiled the Wagon Wheel restaurant in Gill, MA. Our ears perked up as Tom's original blog about it started the wheel rolling (as it were) toward the book he's in the midst of writing.

[Note from Cathy: But the success tips are written already, you say? Not so. Tom wants to look at them again, add, delete, rearrange, edit, emend, clarify, and otherwise put them through a wringer before he'll allow them to be published as a book under his name. And, publishing dates are unpredictable, depending, as they do, on authors. So, we apologize for not announcing sooner why Tom is not blogging much these days. We hope you understand why we held back from saying, "Expect a book from Tom soon."]

At 6 a.m. on 3 July, on NPR, I listened to about 10 people take turns reading a paragraph of the complete Declaration of Independence, 233 years old 18 hours thence. (I teared up, which surprised me—and then it didn't. What's not to tear up about the document and what it stood and stands for?) On 20 January I had also teared up, less for what Mr. Obama's taking the oath meant than for the spectacle of a peaceful transference of power ... AGAIN ... in what has become the most powerful and wealthy nation in history.

As Iran and then Honduras have demonstrated in just the last few weeks, representative democracy is a fragile creature—which makes July 4th and what it portended all the more miraculous.

To top it off there comes the fact that the Declaration of Independence was an utterly absurd idea. Britain, though distracted, was the most powerful nation on earth itself, as of the summer of 1776. And through it flowed much of the Colonies' lifeblood. Washington may well have looked the part of a Commander in Chief, resplendent on one of his grand white horses from the Mount Vernon stables, but he was, in fact, inexperienced (an earlier, botched military foray of his had ignited the French & Indian War), and his army was poorly manned and poorly equipped.

Yet the long odds came in, with many a nod to our beloved ally—France. (God bless!) And hence the first large-scale experiment in citizen sovereignty began. The journey included the burning of Washington by the very same Brits, a ghastly war among brothers, and on through the trenches of World War I, Iwo Jima and D-Day, and the 40-year cold war, when the potential nuclear cloud hung perpetually low in the sky.

The journey was never easy. And so it remains today. Iran and North Korea and Afghanistan and Pakistan are volatile beyond measure. Capitalism's nasty side effects have also caught up with us with a vengeance, as they occasionally do.

And yet on we go. We have many democratic mates today, from massive India to the massive European Union to Japan and Southeast Asia and Oceania and almost all of Latin America. We have an economy that continues to produce and fund entrepreneurs at an undiminished rate—Americans by and large see the impossible as a shot all but in the net—from Bentonville, Arkansas, to Houston to Palo Alto to Portland to Bethesda to Las Vegas to San Diego to Cambridge MA.

There is much work to be done, many potholes to fill, but also an incredible amount worth smiling about and taking pride in. It's been another tough year. And, yes, another great and amazing year in the 233-year journey from Independence Hall.

While it is customary to thank in particular our troops abroad at such a holiday, and so I wholeheartedly do, this year I want to single out the American worker—in particular the small business owners, by the millions, who have redoubled their already Herculean efforts to stay afloat and serve their communities and their employees; and the many, many workers who have taken pay cuts in preference to watching their peers laid off; the involuntarily unemployed who each day get out of bed and pursue the possibility of another job; and the entrepreneurs in tomorrow's industries who continue their 24/7 efforts to build an energetic, and exotic future. Due to so many of these folks it's actually been, in its own way, a grand year—so many have dug deep within and discovered and exhibited astonishing resilience. After all, it's the tough times that, in fact, define us—always has been the case, always will be the case.

Here's to year 234!
Welcome!

(And thank you, dear old Philadelphia!)

Above, R.K. Miles, our home and hardware store in Manchester Center VT—competes successfully with a nearby Home Depot. Below, my local country store, Mach's, in nearby Pawlet VT.

Have you been tuned into the debate? Malcolm Gladwell reviewed Chris Anderson's book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Chris Anderson responded, in part. And Seth Godin chimed in as well. Let us know what you think about the future of Free in the comments.

Cool Friend Rod Beckstrom has recently been appointed the impressive position of CEO of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

Tom loves talking about design, and never shies away from a debate about gender differences. Cool Friend Andrea Learned has a recent post involving both that we think you might enjoy.

If you're not a texting fiend, you might find this acronym decoder site helpful. HTH! (Hope this helps!)

Regular commenter Ian Sanders sent us a link to a good customer service story on his blog. Actually, an over-the-top, awesomely out-of-the-ordinary, beyond-what-you'd-ever-expect customer service story.

Tom Asacker is another person who comments regularly on our blog. We got to know him because Tom Peters used to quote something fun he wrote in a letter to the editor at Fast Company magazine (don't ask how long ago). Asacker sent us a link to a PDF at his site you might enjoy reading: Wealth Flows from Health. Again, customer service is the focus, but it encompasses many aspects of business health.

Here's an article that smacked of Tom's leanings so much that it jumped out at us. "The Forgotten Market Online: Older Women" lays out the case that "New Fashion Sites Target Youth—Though Most Web Apparel Sales Are to Women Over 35."

For those Free Agents out there (and the people who love them), this recent article, "Self-Employed Depression," from the New York Times will most likely ring all too true.

Finally, someone turned us on to a new service which might be useful to someone who doesn't have their own website. Nombray.com is about collecting your online identities (LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in one place.

Postscript: Cool Friend Andrea Learned blogged at her site about logo genderfication, and we thought you might like to read what she has to say.

May the sacrifices of our troops today, in literally dozens of countries, and our veterans be remembered this Memorial Day.

I will be in Seoul on Memorial Day 2009—my special best wishes to our Korean War vets, still largely unhearalded.

Above: Note and flowers left at the Vietnam Memorial.
Below: Old Navy Seabee—actually 24 or 25 at the time; somewhere near Danang, Vietnam, 1966 or 1967.

Erik and Cathy and I and our Enterprise Media colleagues, Stewart Clifford and Dini Coffin, spent two veeeeeery long days doing videos in Stewart's lovely house in Boston's South End. The idea was useful short pieces for use hither, thither, and yon. By the time we wrapped, we’d done about 80, count 'em!, little pieces, each with a complete "micro-story." They're being edited right now.

(NB: There are lots of ways, like a cellphone camera for YouTube sorts of production, we could have proceeded. Perhaps I’m just a "yesterday" sort of guy—but we went with a very world-class camera-and-sound crew.)

We'd love your help! Got any great ideas on the distribution front? To be brutally honest, we wouldn't mind making a buck or two from this, though we also plan some freebie releases at tompeters.com. Let us know ...

(Above, photographer-in-chief Erik Hansen offers a side view of the proceedings as I recount a story. And, below, the punchline.)

The bad news: I'm getting a refund because I made less than I thought I would and hence overpaid my estimated tax.
The worse news: I'm getting a Big Refund because I had a Big Drop in income and had Way Overpaid my estimated tax.

Ah, life.
Happy (!?) Tax Day.

One auto dealership in the Northeast U.S. is expanding while the rest of the auto industry is struggling. To find out one reason that Herb Chambers is thriving, read this blog entry at Enterprise Media.com.

This came to us from the emails to tom at tompeters.com. We leave it for you to decide, is there an idea here you can use? Free booklet (click on the book cover image) at ExtremeCustomerMakeovers.com.

The McKinsey Quarterly has a terrific interview with Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen Fund, on women and leadership.

This one's on our media page, but we just love it when someone "gets Tom." See what we mean in the article "What to Do in Recessionary Times" by Anja Merret on AgoraVox.com.

Dan Pink pointed us to Zappos' mesmerizing real time mapping of people purchasing shoes.