A remarkable person has just landed a guest columnist gig with Entrepreneur Magazine.

Erika Napolefuckintano. The Readhead.

I say Entrepreneur is lucky to have her.

For anyone who’s attended one of my presentations – Branding for the Rest of Us or Leading in a Social World – you’ve probably heard me talk about Erika. I often use her as an example of remarkability – a section where I mash-up Jim Collins and Seth Godin to talk about declaring and being that thing that sets you apart.

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I spent some time with Nicole today, one of my favorite designers in the universe. It reminded me why I (all of us) need to be surrounded by the creative mind more. I’ve written about this before, but there’s some simplicity in my take-aways today.

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If you feel like you need to apologize more in your life, here are three suggestions.

1) Hold a public office

2) Run a Super Bowl ad

3) Get married

I’ve never held a public office and I’ve never run a Super Bowl ad. This would make me, you might suggest, exceptionally unqualified to offer an opinion about how to apologize following a gaffe in either position.

I am married though. And I apologize quite a bit. Given the success rate of these apologies I suppose I’m even less qualified to give advice from that position. So I figure why not opine on the first two?

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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Jim Collins or Seth Godin. Take your pick.

The small stuff matters, and it’s what makes change. I’ve even blogged about it before.

Ever thought that this law works across many other areas in life and work? Is this idea like gravity?

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Every now and then we’re reminded that the Niwot, Colorado-based fashion company Crocs is about to die. On their last legs in 2009, a failed brand 2010. This comes around every now and then for Crocs. I guess the remarkable aesthetic of their first shoe has polarized them in our minds. Which is a good thing for a brand if you want people to talk about it.

We respond to these predictions of Croc’s demise predictably. Like any other kind of polarizing thing. Sara Palin has nothing or everything to offer. Nothing in between.

Crocs isn’t dying at all, of course. They weren’t in 2009 and they aren’t today. Seems like they’re kinda like their namesake. One of the more adaptable companies around.

Business strategy, it’s been said, is like working with hypotheses. You do research before you try something, but in a market-driven context there’s no real way to test it very thoroughly until the market gives your hypothesis some feedback.

I wrinkle my brow a bit when branding and marketing experts craft brand strategies that they claim will cause action. Ideas that don’t just sound good on paper, but can be executed toward causing an action.

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Feelin all rainbow-y today.

I nursed a cold in front of the TV Friday night. Given the election season in Colorado, this was an exercise for the mute button.

I wonder how it would feel knowing you’ve achieved something in your life by primarily bringing down the competition instead of proving your own worth? Would you consider that an achievement?

This, even more than the general nastiness of the ads, was depressing. Due to the onslaught of negativity, I’m feeling a strange urge to contribute something positive to the morass. My part to counter the vibe as it were. After all, there so many more people dedicated to (as a client of mine put it) staying focused on the we’ve never been here before as opposed to the this isn’t working.

People with a profound awareness of this reality are all around me. I’m a lucky guy. A few examples from the work side of my life that’s keeping me hopeful:

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There are many places in the world that have regular “load shedding,” or rolling blackouts. It’s a fact of daily life.

When I travel with my wife and in-laws to India, we stay in a small townhouse in Nashik, Maharashtra. Load shedding is as much a part of our daily planning as what we need to get at market. It effects shower schedules (water is heated by an individual, portable “geyser” that runs on electricity), which cascades into breakfast schedules, which cascades into when we can leave the house, which cascades into when we’ll be able to meet with a visiting relative, which cascades into where we need to be for lunch (the main meal of the day), which inevitably bumps into the next scheduled load shedding.

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