your goals and your strategy must be simple. You must have passion and certainty in order to make a difference as a leader. Your tactics, on the other hand, should be layered, multi-dimensional and reflect the patience of someone who cares about reaching a goal.

When Howard Schultz talks about coffee or Jill Greenberg talks about lighting or Cory Booker talks about education, they can impatiently demand clear and simple results. At the same time, successful leaders see the nuance they'll need in executing to get there.

The paradox is that the simplicity we often seek in search of solutions rarely leads to the patient leadership we need to get them.

Web users have been trained long enough to know what they want: everything.

That’s the promise of the web. Every book for sale at Amazon. Every search result visible on Google. Every auctioned item right there on eBay.

Not piracy. Availability.

...

Into this world walks the MPAA, the movie business and the folks who make books.

And once again, there’s the same mistake: they think piracy is the problem. It’s not. The problem is that these providers are doing nothing to embrace ubiquity, because their heritage is all about scarcity.

It's painful, expensive, time-consuming, stressful and ultimately pointless to work overtime to preserve your dying business model.

...

The history of media and technology is an endless series of failed rearguard actions as industry leaders attempt to solidify their positions on a bed of quicksand.

Schools need to end their rearguard actions too...

Readership of blogs is up infinity percent in the last decade (from zero), and online journals and magazines continue to gain in power and influence.

And there’s more unsettling stuff being read by readers of all ages. Books that question authority and force readers to consider deeply held beliefs. The words may have gotten shorter (along with the sentences), but there’s plenty of intellectual ruckus being made.

You could view this shift as the end of the world and a threat to how you publish, or you could view it as an opportunity and shift gears as quickly as you possibly can. Publish what people choose to read (at a price they want to pay), and odds are, they will choose to read it. There’s plenty of room for leadership and art here, but little room for stubborn intransigence.

Most of the time there's something that needs to be done where the answer is unknowable until you do it...

That's what we're waiting for you to do.

Steve [Jobs] devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you're reading this on.

What are we going to do with it?

Apparently in P-12 and higher ed classrooms we're mostly going to ignore it...

If you're not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

...

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

By the time the fear subsides, it will be too late. By the time you're not afraid of what you were planning to start/say/do, someone else will have already done it, it will already be said or it will be irrelevant. The reason you're afraid is that there's leverage here, something might happen. Which is exactly the signal you're looking for.

shun the non-believers. Your product isn’t for everyone, that’s fine. No need to persuade them. Focus on those that are interested instead.

That's a very easy way to judge the posture and speed of a brand. If there's a one-way track--stuff gets added, but it never gets taken away--then the ship is going to get slower and heavier and become much harder to handle until it eventually sinks.

If you want to build a caring organization, you need to fill it with caring people and then get out of their way. When your organization punishes people for caring, don't be surprised when people stop caring.

This is the post-industrial era. Success is not about speeding up the assembly line as much as it relies on individuals able to create leaps forward. The person capable of doing that sort of work is in far higher demand than ever before.

Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

...

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

As soon as you say, "failure is not an option," you've just said, "innovation is not an option."

Economies of scale are well understood. . . . But what about the economies of small?

. . .

If your goal is to make more art, it's entirely possible the ridding yourself of obligations and scale will help you do that.

I want to make an impact. But I also want to do work that makes my heart sing. Dilemmas, dilemmas...

In a world where attention is the scarce resource, the enemy as Tim O’Reilly put it, is obscurity, not piracy.

The competition for a Kindle book isn’t the hardcover. The competition is a game on the iPad or a movie from Netflix or a song playing on your Sonos. Pricing is about substitutions, and if we want books to avoid becoming a tiny niche, we need to price accordingly. There are more substitutes, and they are cheaper than ever before.

A check in your wallet does you very little good. It represents opportunity, sure, but not action.

Most of us are carrying around a check, an opportunity to make an impact, to do the work we're capable of, to ship the art that would make a difference.

Ted Leonsis theorized twenty years ago that the giant difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated.

The experiences you create are the moments that define you. We'll miss you when you're gone, because we will always remember the mark you made on us.

There's a sign on most squash courts encouraging players to wear only sneakers with non-marking soles. I'm not sure there's such a thing. If you've going to do anything worthy, you're going to leave a mark.

It takes guts to be an insurgent, and even though the asymmetrical nature of challenging the status quo is in their favor, often we find we're short on guts. ... and then the incumbents prevail.

When people care about a brand or a cause or an idea, it's likely that have other things in common. And the caring causes them to invest attention. Once they've done that, they can't help but notice that others don't see things the way they do. We ignore the great unwashed and reserve our disdain for those like us, that care like us, but don't see things as we do.

The really good news is that the tribe cares. If you don't have that, you've got nothing of value. In fact, the squabbling among people who care is the first sign you're on to something.

I think you have an obligation to say, "Sir, I'm going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way..."

...

When you discover that one class after another has so many people in a giant room watching a tenured professor far far in the distance, perhaps you could mention the debt part to the dean and ask if the class could be on video so you could spend your money on interactions that actually changed your life.

The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.

Access to knowledge, for the first time in history, is largely unimpeded for the middle class. Without effort or expense, it's possible to become informed if you choose. For less than your cable TV bill, you can buy and read an important book every week. Share the buying with six friends and it costs far less than coffee.

Or you can watch TV.

Where, precisely, do you go in order to get permission to make a dent in the universe?

...

If you think there's a chance you can make a dent, GO.

Now.

Hurry.

The problem with putting it all on the line...

is that it might not work out.

The problem with not putting it all on the line is that it will never (ever) change things for the better.

everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one

by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior

Read Seth's whole post to see why. See also http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/03/iowa-invest-in-leadership.html