There is not much of a silver lining to the Gulf oil spill, but people in charge – whether entrepreneurs, executives or longtime business owners – can garner valuable wisdom from one of the many mistakes that made the disaster more likely.

Potentially, busy with the severe recession, the financial sector bailout and the fight for a national health care plan, the Obama administration missed at least one ball it should have been keeping in the air: effective regulation of the oil industry in general and of deep-water drilling in particular.

The potent lesson for those of us in charge? There’s a question we should ask ourselves often, and that we should grant ourselves the mental space and creative license to answer: What am I missing?

It’s natural and tempting to get on a track and follow it, or to create a plan and execute it without taking the time and energy to step to the side and take stock – frequently. Are you missing opportunities? Not alert to certain dangers? Letting issues, people, money, or projects slide while you deal with everyday urgencies and tempests in a teapot?

It’s true that people in charge have many of their best ideas while driving, showering or taking a vacation. Extend that freedom of mind into your everyday routine. Assign or put aside routine tasks to facilitate your own creative thinking. Read a business book on a new topic. Ask yourself if there’s anything on your mind that you’re not dealing with (it’s often right there below the surface). Access your right brain.

What am I missing? I’m glad I asked myself. I’ll ask again. And again.

“And I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar; we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick,” proclaimed our president this morning in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show.

Some people may object to this remark because it is coarse. I object because it is disingenuous and clearly the brainchild of a media relations team. “President Obama! The American People think you’re an effete intellectual. They think you lack emotion. They want to see you get mad!” And, “The American People do not want to hear about experts or scholars. They want you to get out there and KICK ASS!”

President Obama, polls or no polls, please speak with your authentic voice. Work with BP, work with everyone who can help clean up this terrible mess, build some regulations, kick some ass if necessary, but don’t talk to us as if street fightin’ is your way of life. Get real.

It’s the financial markets meltdown all over again, but this time we can smell it, slip on it and watch the Gulf of Mexico sicken. The two catastrophes have a lot in common. As a nation, we’ve been lulled too far toward  allowing the free market to police itself in high-risk industries. It’s not working very well, is it?

BP CEO Tony Hayward admitted Thursday that the company was unprepared for an accident of this magnitude. In an interview with The Financial Times, he acknowledged that BP “did not have the tools” at hand to stop or contain the spill when it occurred six weeks ago. Of course, BP still doesn’t have the tools.

I’m an entrepreneur and a fan of business, on the whole. It would be splendid if corporations could be relied upon to consistently behave in the best interests of the public. But they don’t. The argument that an unbridled free market is the best option for the economy (let alone the environment) is proving itself hollow. The recent Great Recession and continuing questionable recovery has cost individuals, families, businesses, schools, and state and local governments dearly. We can thank short-term thinking, greed, hubris, and extraordinarily weak regulation of the financial markets for a good deal of what’s ailed us since 2008. Now the largest oil spill in U.S. history highlights the same maladies.

We’re deep drilling when we don’t have either the comprehensive engineering preparedness or the truly at-the-ready remediation tools to prevent destroying our oceans, shores, fisheries, tourism, and more. We are deep drilling with weak safety regulations, some of which were disregarded in any case. Aren’t we any smarter than that?

Leaders – business, government and community – must sear into our brains the truth that next month, next year and the next decade are at least as important as our immediate profits, trades, deadlines, and triumphs.

Work well independently?

Telecommuting, flex time and virtual business models are all the rage. Outsourcing projects rather than committing to long-term staff additions is popular now, too. No surprise there. The current state of the economy (I can barely wait until we’re no longer using that phrase quite so often!) demands efficiency, forces uncertainty, and makes available some stellar candidates with whom to work. In other words, a lot of great people are out of their former 9-5 salaried work routines. Even the 2010 census work is moving faster than expected because of the availability of outstanding temporary labor. Oh, that’s not much of a silver lining, perhaps, but there it is.

These new ways of working bode well for some businesses, and for some individuals. Streamlined processes, virtual meetings, work from anywhere (okay, let’s not text from a moving car – work from almost anywhere) are a boon for the highly motivated, organized and talented. But what about everyone else?

One of the concerns many thought leaders express about the new economy is that it yields work for the best, brightest and most driven (now including all that consulting, flexible positions, telecommuting, and other non-traditional arrangements). It also continues to offer a range of service work that, at least for now, requires a human presence (from health care to fine cooking). And there are still a number of U.S. manufacturing jobs, although that number continues to dwindle.

But what else? There’s a gap, likely to continue broadening, where there used to be more jobs for the rest of the workforce. As the economy continues to shift, what happens to the worker who needs the structure of an office to maintain motivation? The person who shows up for the assembly line? Where are the jobs for the capable person willing to work steadily all day or night but simply not constituted to come up with lots of big ideas, manage time completely independently or work alone? If you’ve ever been an employer or a manager, you know that these people make up the majority of many a workplace – that’s the way the world is and probably always has been.

This week, Time magazine’s article The Workforce: Where Will the New Jobs Come From? provides hope that there will be new jobs. That’s good. But for any leader or citizen who hopes to see the economy truly thrive again, there’s that other question, not so easy to answer. Will there be enough jobs for the great majority of working class and middle class Americans who do well working for a company, who respond to expectations set by management and who would like to put in a good day’s work for decent pay, then head home to their real lives? That’s a lot of people, and we all need to put our imaginations to work to make sure our economy continues to fully employ and value what continues to be the majority of the population.

Continued funding programs for better roads and bridges? Encouraging young people to go into trades such as plumbing or electrical work, in which shortages are predicted? Putting more adults in the schools to work with the kids? Opening more child care centers, which require staffing? Offering real live tech support? Human cashiers at the supermarket?

What could work and be valuable? What do you think?

To read or not to read...

… and I’d like not to be worried. After all, for me, the smell of a Barnes & Noble is nearly aphrodisiac, and I consider the buying, reading and piling up of books and magazines my birthright. I confess to not having a Kindle or similar device yet, but I know that’s coming. To me, format matters, but content matters more. That’s why I found Fortune’s cover story The Future of Reading particularly thought-provoking. I can’t believe it… could it even be possible… that people will ever lose interest completely in reading? Let it not be so.

Fortune, of course, is speaking largely from a business perspective, especially regarding journalistic concerns. I noticed that I couldn’t find the text of that March 1 lead article, which I first devoured in print while waiting at my allergist’s office, online as I wrote this – since it’s this week’s issue, Fortune would no doubt like us to buy the magazine and thus support the advertising. I certainly understand this. After all, a great deal of vSA’s work is in public relations, media relations in particular. If there is no revenue, there will be no publications. Plain and simple. Fortune, and even Broom, Brush & Mop magazine – difficult as it is to believe – are not mere labors of love.

Here’s my educated guess, based on the cosmic and not-so-cosmic shifts I’ve seen in my decades on this earth and at my desk (including the door-on-file-cabinets that served as my vSA desk in those first daring years of entrepreneurship): Reading will not die. The stature of Amazon and my beloved Barnes & Noble are evidence to that. Sadly, small bookstores and publications large and small have suffered and will continue to do so. The media will continue to adapt, with false starts and many casualties, to new models for advertising and other revenue generation. More and more of our reading will be done on notepads and online. People will continue to love video in all its forms, and many – okay, most – will prefer it to the written word.

But there is a magnetism to writing and to reading, and, despite the challenges of doing it well, there is a certain simplicity and joy to creating stories – just think, most children compose tales and essays as soon as they can wield a crayon or navigate a keyboard. We love our news (both the important and the supremely trivial) and we relish our rehashing of information, much of which will continue to be in the form of articles, opinions and other text.

Fortune, by the way, agrees, by and large: Reading – somehow, someway – will live on. What’s your take?

Are you tired of hearing the words, “No one could have predicted…” and variants thereof? I am, because the consequences of people in positions of responsibility not thinking outside the box and not planning and initiating appropriate action are often extreme. Here are just a few examples that should be etched into our collective memories:

Predictable given the mood of the public-Scott Brown’s election and the resulting likely (if temporary) demise of comprehensive health care reform: Putting your personal politics aside for a moment, imagine you are President Obama, Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid – it’s okay, it’s just for a minute. Obama should have become more involved, and Congress should have moved faster – before the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority.

Predictable given geological and infrastructure facts-Haiti’s disaster: Construction with few building standards built on a fault line. An airport with such small capacity that only a few planes can be there at any one time. Add one (predictable) earthquake and we have the tragedy we see today. Worst thing? It could happen again.

Predictable given economic facts and indicators-The collapse of the housing market and the too-big-to-fail banks and our subsequent economic woes. As I’ve mentioned in this forum in the past, my father, a retired schoolteacher, accurately predicted the housing market collapse a couple of years before it happened. It’s hard to believe bankers, economists and politicians lacked the same data.

Predictable given clearly inferior engineering combined with neighborhoods below sea level-By now, what we knew and didn’t act on following Hurricane Katrina should be obvious. But guess what? We still haven’t fixed the problem with the levies, even as we rebuild below sea level in New Orleans.

Those are political issues that affect the world. Complacency and inaction are enormous factors in business, too. Consultatively, vSA always urges business leaders to step outside the box to think the big thoughts and then to act on them as needed. We all know how easy it is each day to pursue the latest deal, address the most recent 200 emails and just try to stay afloat keeping up with the urgent. However, it is hardly cliche to remember this: Do not overlook the important in favor of the merely urgent.

Thoughts, examples, strategies?

I hope Martha Coakley will win the Massachusetts Special Election today, I really do.

As I voted for her this morning, I was struck by a feeling that she needs all of us to pull her feet out of the fire and that, to some extent, she has earned this close race through her lackluster campaign. This is not to say she won’t be a good senator – she’s been a good attorney general. She simply isn’t experienced as a politician running for election, and she appeared to somewhat take this election for granted once she’d cleared the primary.

To the Coakley campaign, Scott Brown probably appeared at first  to be an upstart without a chance. Martha Coakley’s campaign missed the mood of many Massachusetts residents – residents tired of the bad economy, worried about what health care reform will actually mean to them and impatient with the Obama administration. Brown painted Coakley as an insider and himself as some odd combination of good lookin’ cowboy and down-home neighbor. In fact, he’s more conservative than is a match for Massachusetts. Boston.com published a January 10 article citing important examples: “Last week he embraced waterboarding. Last month he expressed skepticism that climate change is being caused by humans. He has even denounced two national proposals that he supported in Massachusetts as a lawmaker – mandatory health care coverage and a cap-and-trade system to cut global warming gases.” Great.

Martha Coakley, I hope you win… despite yourself.

Every once in awhile, something happens in the world that is so immense that it jars us out of our daily routine. The earthquake in Haiti is one of those events. It puts into perspective our daily travails: business concerns, stress, minor disagreements with family, and that ten or twenty pounds we want to lose or gain.

Of course, many people here at home and globally struggle with serious issues, too. For those of us whose worries are not so dire, this is a good time to remember that we are empowered to help – to support people in Haiti and everywhere whose lives are truly a day-to-day struggle. In the instance of Haiti, consider an online donation to the Red Cross or to Clinton Foundation fund for Haiti Earthquake Relief.

Is it just me, or is business getting extraordinarily complex?

Oh, it’s just me?

I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Because here’s my thesis: nothing is easy anymore. Only the strong will thrive. Just as jobs for low-skilled labor are as scarce as flowers on Mars (or has that changed, too?) successful careers for high-skilled professionals in marketing, technology, industry, and the like are not for the weak of spirit.

Top five reasons why Work is So Complicated Now:

5- The oversupply of really smart people, devising new stuff. Innovations are everywhere.

4- Global everything, with all the cultural differences, language barriers, legal obstacles, and heavy competition that brings. (Leben ist schwierig.)*

*Life is difficult (German).

3- TECHNOLOGY.

2- Related to #3, new communication techniques, and a startling abundance of information sources, some of them reliable. Who can possibly read it all? Or remember 50% of what one would like to know?

1- Energy. And I don’t mean alternative. I mean the kind that you and I need just to keep up, let alone lead the pack.

How does a marketing professional serve clients brilliantly, especially when staffing is short, budgets are tight, and careers can live or die by short-term ROI? Few people can glide by for too long anymore without hard work. (And yes, I suspect that once, in a faraway time, perhaps the 90s, some mythical ad people could do just that. Probably they had talent, or charm. Something like that.) In a profession that has at times received and on a few occasions even earned the dubious distinction of being composed of hot air (yes, marketing, unfair as that may seem) the air has cooled, at least for the moment.

Now, working smart is critical. Just for starters, keeping up with industry news and trends is a marketing must. At vSA, we’ve become selectively engaged with Twitter, for example. We can use it to quickly get the word out about news of interest to important editors and our clients’ prospects. We’ve also seen that our clients can sometimes benefit as much by having customers make positive comments about their products on Facebook and post engaging videos on YouTube as they do from certain trade shows. More than in the past, we feel the need to monitor even relatively recent vSA work to assure that it’s up to the minute: for example, some Web applications we created to help clients sell online four years ago need to be updated… already and probably not for the last time.

But we have an additional responsibility as well. Outside of subjects that are clearly “of our industry,” it’s become more incumbent than ever to follow world news, fast-changing consumer trends, the mood of the nation, the day-to-day state of various segments of the economy, and more. Today I learned something more about Total Recall, a Microsoft research project based on the prediction that an archive of an individual’s digital data, largely generated without much of that individual’s thought, through GPS, cell phones, cameras, credit cards, health records and everything else he or she does, will someday create a pretty comprehensive record of that person’s life… and will thus change the way humans use and recall memory. Concepts like that, when they achieve traction (aside from being in my opinion pretty creepy) are always appropriated by business and marketing interests. So we marketers need to know about them. I also learned today that some prominent economists are concerned that the Obama administration has lost its way in pushing for regulatory reform of the financial markets and that these same economists fear that another economic collapse may be just scant (really scant) years away. Mmmm, hope they’re wrong, but better bear it in mind.

My point is that to be truly excellent as a high-level consultant in marketing today requires vision, diligence in meeting world situations face-to-face and the energy to continue to understand the ways people want to communicate now – and what these people want and need to hear. No hot air.

Perhaps you’ve heard this possibly-true story before? British statesman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, noted for his wit, at a party, talking with a socialite:

Churchill: Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?
Socialite: My goodness, Mr. Churchill! Well, I suppose – we would have to discuss terms, naturally.
Churchill: Would you sleep with me for five pounds?
Socialite: Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!
Churchill: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

As a business owner, there’s one thing I like about this recession. Just one, I think. And that one thing is this: during “challenging times” (gotta love that phrase) people show you who they are. (And now we are just haggling about the price.) I like to take advantage of these moments of exposure. When people show me who they are, they’re doing me a favor, albeit unwittingly. Here’s a fab-u-lous opportunity to learn who I’m dealing with, and to determine how (and whether) to deal with that person again. In some cases, the phrase “it’ll be a dark day in hell” flashes like neon in front of my brain when thinking about re-engaging with a person. In others, I find a new friend or mentor.

Quiz: Does your boss/client/spouse/”friend” crush you beneath her heel when she finds herself in control? BAD SIGN!

Carefully observe…

The way very privileged people treat service personnel – the best people treat others the best, do they not? – the way employees treat their boss when raises fail to appear or life is crappy (I consider the French trend of holding the boss hostage when he lays you off to be in poor taste, for example), the rabid way Newt Gingrich behaves in the face of a popular Obama administration, and the way partners and spouses treat each other when the pressure is on… these actions and attitudes can all be taken seriously.

Me? I’m really trying to be nice… especially after I hit the “publish” button today!