Somewhere in the DesertOK - so I tweeted that Kathleen and I were driving from Nashville to LA in a pickup truck and we got such a big response, I thought I'd fill you in a bit. At Christmas, we bought our daughter a used Prius, so she needed to sell the pick-up truck she'd been driving for the last couple of years. (Keep in mind she's a roots music banjo player, so a pickup is perfect.) But it had so many miles on it, it wouldn't be worth selling, so we thought we'd just drive it back to LA and use it for hauling stuff at our office at Cooke Pictures. So after the NRB Convention, we loaded up and headed West. We haven't done that drive since college, and here's a few things we discovered:

1. Christians still have poor taste. All the "Repent!", "Jesus Saves," or "The End is Near" signs are pretty drab from a design perspective. You're supposed to be telling a life changing message, but you do it with a boring sign? Not cool.

2. Casinos are everywhere! I had no idea there were so many casinos on I-40. Trust me, we didn't defeat the Native Americans. They've defeated us.

3. Lots of "Adult" stores out there on the highway. We saw more billboards for - well, you know. Icky all around.

4. Visitors steal 1 ton of petrified wood from the Petrified National Forrest a month. The forrest is being decimated by tourists.

5. Best highways? Tennessee. Worst? Oklahoma.

6. We spent a lot of time searching for a Starbucks.

7. Most important, I discovered that we need to spend more time looking at the world at eye level. Technology makes us think we're connecting, but too often, we spend most of our time at 30,000 feet - only seeing life from a distance, or Twittering from the margins. But we need to remember that real connection happens eye to eye. The waitress at the diner, the BBQ cook, the highway patrolman, the park ranger - all have fascinating stories when we take the time to look. I'm not too eager to do this trip again, but I'll never forget what I learned from meeting people I would have never crossed paths with on Facebook.

..and did I mention I don't want to do it again?

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This past week, Kathleen and I went on a "road trip" - something we haven't done since college. I'll write about the trip tomorrow, but the sad news was that as we were driving home, our housesitter called to tell us that our dog Maggie had died in the night. We don't know what it was, especially since she was only seven. It always sounds weird for a grown person to be blubbering about their dog, but Maggie certainly was special. Not the smartest dog by any means, but possibly the most loving. She was the company dog at Cooke Pictures, (see the bottom of the page), and if you've ever been to our office, you've met her, and probably wiped her hair off your pants in the process. At home, neighbors who don't know our name, know Maggie. Today was the first day we woke up in the house without her, and it was tough. Maggie will be missed.

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During the current recession, companies have discovered that in a chaotic, disrupted business environment, business plans don't always work. As the market changed with lightening speed, marketing plans were tossed out the window in favor of being more nimble. Walt Shill, head of North American management consultant Accenture says, "Strategy as we knew it, is dead." Increased flexibility and making decisions on the fly is the order of the day as executives react to a dramatically changing business landscape.

But before you toss your strategic plans out the window, let me make one important point. Leaders who are good at flying by the seat of their pants, tend to start with a strategy. Ernest Hemingway used to counsel young writers that the first principle of good writing is to learn all the rules. The second is to know when to toss the rules out the window.

He meant that if you have a solid base, it allows you more freedom. Before you toss your plans, you need to have one in the first place. So before you think it's OK to toss out planning and wing it, think again. Develop a plan. Work out a strategy. Then, if the market takes a radical shift, you're in a far better place for jumping out of the plane.

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This week, our daughter Bailey took us out to The Station Inn in downtown Nashville. It's a bare bones local music venue, but one with a great history. On Monday night's the group "The Time Jumpers" play classic country music - mostly Western Swing, and the great thing about the event is the performers. The band is made up of some of the most talented studio players & performers in Nashville, with folks like Vince Gill sitting in as well. In fact, during the performance, Elvis Costello showed up to play a few great country numbers himself. The atmosphere is great. Mostly locals, who have paid only $10 at the door. A bar in the back. No bodyguards or security. The performers - including Vince - all carry their own instruments and amps, and during the breaks, wander out into the audience to simply have a beer or hang out.

This is what happens when passion is more important than money. The performers can't be paid much, so they're not doing it for money. They're doing it simply for the love of music. The audience is appreciative, the band is having a ball, and it was one of the best concerts I've ever experienced.

As a great example, as I write this, our daughter Bailey Cooke - a roots musician herself - is moving into a small backyard guest house in Nashville. It's not much, but at only $250 a month, it will allow her to focus on her music, rather than working all the time to pay her rent. You can hear a bit of her new album here.

What about your own life? Do you live for passion or money? Obviously we want to pay our bills and be financially successful. But when you focus on money, it doesn't take long to forget your real passion. Why did you get into your work? What drives you?

Whatever it is, don't lose touch with your passion, because passion is what fuels great a performance.

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Recently released UFO records from the British government confirm the power of perception. If you study how people's UFO reports have changed over time, you'll note that in the 1940's and 1950's people reported UFO's as "flying discs" or "flying saucers." At the same time, the popular Hollywood depictions of UFO's as in "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) or "Forbidden Planet" (1956) was intergalactic Frisbees. But as science fiction movies changed, UFO reports oddly changed as well. After the powerful opening sequence of Star Wars featured the giant triangle shaped spacecraft, or the unveiling of the Stealth bomber (also triangle shaped), UFO "reporters" started seeing a wider variety of shapes, most notably triangles.

What does it mean? Our brains make connections. And whether or not UFO's are real, we tend to make statements based on familiar images stored in our brains. Our debt to great stories and myths runs deep.

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When discussing politics, religion, marketing, or any debatable subject, the key word is "converts" - which refers to people who don't start out agreeing with you. Most media and public figures today are simply "posturing." They're exciting and motivating to those who already support their cause. Just because you can get your talk radio, church, political party, or TV audience worked up, doesn't mean you're actually engaging the other side. It doesn't mean you're making a difference or changing people's minds. In measuring social, cultural, religious, political, or any other type of change, the secret is converts - people who disagreed with you before, but now agree with you. Until you have a measurable group of converts, all the posturing in the world won't make much difference.

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I spoke to a class of university film students at Biola University in Los Angeles, who asked me to give them some career advice before graduation. A friend, award winning advertising writer David Morgenstern, shared some tips with me for the class that he had given to USC film students a few years ago, and they were so fantastic, I wanted to share them with you:

1) Return every call and e-mail quickly. Show up on time, even if you're the only one there. Dress like you deserve your salary. Believe me, that will put you ahead of a surprising number of people.

2) Write thank-you notes. Remember birthdays. Remember the assistants, and the secretaries, the coordinators, and the mailroom folks. This is a people business. And people never forget how they are treated.

3) Every day, you are placing a brick in the tower of your reputation. Remember, everything you do, big and small, either adds or subtracts from your reputation.

4) Watch what you say in elevators, in restrooms, on airplanes and in casual conversation. She could be the client's wife. He could be the boss's brother. She could be your competitor's accountant.

5) Don't care who solves it. Just get it solved.

6) Learn how to tell a story: Every client presentation, every report, every commercial-it's all about stories. Stories are how human beings make sense of the world. If you want to succeed in this business, be able to tell stories in ways that capture your audience's attention.

7) When emotions are running high, make sure yours are running low. Life is unfair, so learn to lose with dignity. And, learn to win with dignity. That means no excuses. No crybabies. No bragging. No trashing. Learn how to move on.

8) Proofread. Spell-check.

9) Good enough, isn't. There is going to be someone out there who will sleep less and work harder, will give up their weekend, and give it one more shot. That is the person that I bet on to win.

10) Think different. Be brave. The world is full of people with conventional ideas who go along with the crowd. It's the mavericks and the dreamers who move things forward. When you hear an idea that makes you nervous, makes you sweat, occasionally gather your courage, take a stand, take a risk, suck it up and go out on a limb. Hey, you might even be right.

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Just when you thought social media and online entertainment were replacing traditional TV viewing, Emmy Magazine and Nielsen reports that we shouldn't count TV out yet. When DVR's are factored in, TV viewing is actually up 12.3% - especially for prime time viewing. Some other interesting information from the latest reports indicate that only about half of DVR's fast forward through commercials, and comedies and science-fiction programs are doing well, but reality isn't. DVR owners are also using Friday night to catch up on programs they've recorded during the week. When the network started programming weaker shows on Friday nights, viewers apparently decided to use that night to enjoy better programs recorded earlier in the week. The most popular DVR programs?

1. The Office
2. Heroes
3. Dollhouse
4. Fringe
5. Smallville
6. Glee
7. So You Think You Can Dance? (Tues.)
8. 30 Rock
9. House
10. So You Think You Can Dance? (Wed.)

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"Tenure" usually refers to job security, particularly in the academic world. Essentially, it's about a senior professor's contractual right to keep from being fired without just cause. Supposedly, tenure helps keep senior professors at a university, so the school isn't always searching for new teachers, but more important, it's a guarantee that a teacher won't be fired for speaking out or teaching controversial ideas. Essentially, the core values of tenure are academic freedom. It's supposed to give teachers an incentive to stretch their thinking. However, we've discovered that without an element of risk, people do exactly the opposite. Instead of pushing the boundaries, many would say that tenured teachers seem more likely to coast or slack off. That seems particularly true when tenure is applied to high schools where the oversight is incredibly lax. California grants tenure after just two years in the classroom. New York waits for a total of three years. That means that after only 2 or 3 years, a teacher essentially has their job for life.

This makes is nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers. LA Weekly reported that in the past decades, LA Unified spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven teachers for poor classroom performance. The sad result was that just two were fired, two others were paid large settlements and one was reinstated. 32 other teachers were paid $50,000 each in secret just to leave without a fight. One administrator told me there are nearly 100 separate steps to complete for the district to fire a single teacher, and it often drags on for years. Sometimes the teacher sits at home for years with full pay waiting for the outcome. With policies like that, is there any wonder California is bankrupt and the schools are shameful?

Human nature being what it is, we tend to rest on our laurels. When the risk is removed, our drive is often removed as well. When it comes to tenure, what started out as well meaning, has gone horribly wrong - to the point that I believe the entire tenure system needs to be yanked.

I love teaching and have many friends who are great professors. Benefits are a wonderful thing, but whatever the job, when you remove all the risk, you also remove the edge that it takes to succeed. Just ask the Winter Olympic athletes. If a Gold Medal was a sure thing, they wouldn't have spent so many years fighting the odds to become the great athletes we see today.

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Every day, great ideas are shot down because they look stupid at first. That's because our natural tendency is to make an immediate judgement. Perhaps over the millennia, making a quick judgement has been helpful in hostile situations, but in a creative or business environment, it's deadly. Even if it's part of our DNA, we have to fight the desire to make snap judgements. When a new idea is presented, no matter how strange or unlikely it may seem, give it some space. Ask some questions. Look at it from different perspectives. Above all, don't use a snap judgement for political purposes to humiliate opponents. I've been in far too many meetings when great ideas where killed - not because of the idea, but because someone used it to take a swipe and boost their ego.

Ideas are more important than policies, rules, or sermons, because ideas can change the world. So hold off on quick judgements and give ideas time to prove themselves.

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