I've been second guessing myself lately on this. A huge focus of mine over the past couple of years has been to inject brand led thinking, storytelling, and people with creative sensibilities born of traditional advertising into a new digitally centered organization in order to create a better mouse trap. In my language I constantly pay homage to creativity and the big idea. I urge my teams to not settle for anything less, to constantly search for and gain a clients alignment to a big idea than caries the possibility to improve their business results.

But I've recently been reminded that a great big idea is nothing but a big pile of potential nothing else. Potential is another way to say for "you have not done anything about it". The fact that someone is incredibly insightful, or creative does not guarantee they are successful. It's the ones that also have the skills, the tools and most importantly the motivation to realize or materialize that idea that succeed.

I've been too focused on the idea generation, and maybe not enough on the idea realization business.

Lesson learned..

We recently held a small client summit where we brought a handful of our clients together to network and share their experiences with multi-channel marketing and commerce. I took on the job of facilitating the conversation, and I came up with 20 provocative questions that I felt would drive some interesting dialogue. The first question we pulled out of the hat (it was actually a bowl) was.

"What is the biggest obstacle your company is facing in adapting to a multichannel world, and what are you doing to overcome it?" - The first person quickly said "my organization gets in the way" two and a half hours later and we never made it to question number two. In fact everyone had something to add - turf wars, incentives etc. Not a single one had anything to share regarding a solution and these were all "C" level folks from some very big brands you all would recognize.

So now I'm putting my team to work on a whitepaper on the subject of "organizational design in a multi-channel world"

I'm very interested to hear from you. Do you have any first hand experience on how someone has broken down those barriers? Any suggestions on what industries, companies or individuals "get it"?

I'll share some preliminary thoughts in the next few post

I've been in the interactive game since the beginning, which is actually not so long ago. I can vividly remember when Amazon.com was the benchmark for success in e-commerce. Every one of our clients looked up to Amazon as the model for customer experience and a beacon of innovation. What happened to them?

Today is December 22 and I'm nervous (actually panicked) because half of my stuff is not here. In fact I'm so disturbed by this I may actually get in my car and drive to the mall, which is something I literally have avoided the last five years running. Yes, I'm that guy who does 100% of their holiday shopping online, or I should now rephrase I WAS.

It's beginning to feel that heading o the store may be better at this point than lurking around the neighborhood trying to get a glimpse of that shiny UPS truck.

Wish me luck.