Do you provide online gift cards for your online shop? If not, it may be something you want to consider. CashStar released the results of an interesting survey about pre-holiday online shopping and gift cards.

The survey indicated that more consumers are going online to purchase gift cards, and not just plastic gift cards for the physical world, but electronic gift-cards that can be delivered through email.

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What many people regard as the official start of the holiday shopping season went quite well, according to statistics from comScore.  Indeed - although it's too early to tell for sure - Black Friday appeared to point the way towards retail sites experiencing a better season this year than last.

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Have you noticed the tectonic plates starting to shift? Values and social purpose are creeping back into the business strategy conversation. Big societal problems are the next innovation frontier, and the best companies are practicing what I call "leadership yoga" — flipping the organization upside down to have their eyes to the ground to see the grass roots, where the next opportunities are starting to grow.

The least-advantaged places are becoming the best beta sites for business innovation. Particularly in emerging markets, growth opportunities lie in meeting unmet needs, getting there first with solutions that improve quality of life for neglected but large populations. ICICI Bank has become a profitable giant and a learning laboratory for the world through technological innovations to serve the visually-impaired (talking ATMs) and remote farmers (banking services through cell phones).

For vanguard companies, a desire to address unmet societal needs with the latest technology, not with charity or hand-me-downs, is central to their missions and also helps motivate creativity. Apple began 30 years ago with a social mission bigger than producing cool stuff. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak wanted to make bicycles for the mind, to make affordable computing power available to the masses; the first big markets for Apple computers were in schools. Finding what society needs is relevant in low-tech industries too. Cement company CEMEX's attention to social needs and local conditions has generated innovations such as anti-bacterial concrete, which is particularly important for hospitals and farms; water-resistant concrete helpful in flood-prone areas; or used tires converted to road surface for countries with rapid growth in road construction.

Japanese electronics company Omron encourages its people to find opportunities to serve society through technological innovations. Omron founder Kazuma Tateisi saw the identification and resolution of social needs as Omron's core competency. Today's executives quote his frequent exhortation: "Selling products is not enough. I want representatives to bring back needs from the customers — as many as possible, as quickly as possible. That is the other half of a sales person's job." Kazuma-san felt that the more Omron contributed to the society, the more problems the society will bring to Omron to solve.

When solving problems of disadvantage is at the forefront, five innovation advantages can accrue:

• Bigger idea pool: a wider search is wider for broader ideas with bigger potential. People search more broadly, see more opportunities, and generate more ideas if they are encouraged to think about the world and not just about their function. If they look closely at society, not just as a market abstraction but as a collection of fellow humans with needs worthy of attention, they see that there is always room for improvement. "Better" is always a moving target. Having more ideas enter the innovation funnel provides more options and more improvements.

• Greater solutions-orientation: motivation to serve customers and users. When people feel their ideas will contribute to serving society, beyond the quest for revenues and profits, there is an additional motivational boost to focus on new solutions, not just pushing more of what they already know. They care about solving the problem because it is connected with their values, and they are willing to keep working until the problem is solved, not just until they have a product to throw over the transom. They want to engage those who have the problem in defining if the solution works for them. This puts passion and heart into user-directed innovation.

• Open innovation: a greater willingness to draw on resources outside the organization, to work with partners, and to share ideas. Open innovation — the sharing of ideas among partners and willingness to draw on other people's technology in the service of a higher end — relies less on pride of ownership; the important thing is getting the job done.

• Less politics, less controversy, greater cooperation. Values and principles provide a basis for cordial internal conversation that elicits cooperation. This makes it possible for innovators to assemble the right team quickly, because others in the organization share a common goal despite the different positions they occupy. Invoking shared values can also wear down opponents and critics, surfacing the underlying interests that negotiations scholars find makes "Yes" a likely answer. Tying projects to enduring principles helps people rise above politics. Putting the good of the wide external community first helps get backing in the internal company community.

• Faster execution: shorter communication and feedback loops. The very articulation of societal purpose as a driver of innovation helps shorten mental and organizational loops. Greater awareness on everyone's part of their role in an end-to-end chain of impact can help bridge the gap between theory and practice. The research lab can come closer to the world of users, and those working with the wider society closer to the developers of new technology.

Seeing the world from the bottom up rather than with the detached and distant perspective of headquarters can produce powerful innovation-facilitators. Practitioners of leadership yoga gain flexibility, speed, and new ideas from standing conventional wisdom on its head.

"The strongest of all warriors are these two: Time and Patience."
– Leo Tolstoy

"I'm the decider," former President George Bush famously uttered in April of 2006. "I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense." Bush's use of the term "decider" captures the essence of his Administration's approach to governing: making "right decisions" as opposed to making decisions the right way. And, as has been ably chronicled by Bob Woodward and numerous others, Bush's "right decisions" were often Texas-cowboy-shoot-from-the-hip-and-ask-questions-later-gut-feelings-of-rightness decisions.

How refreshing it has been, then, to see President Obama engage in a deeply deliberative process over whether to commit more U.S. troops to the war in Afghanistan. Though accused of "dithering" over war strategy by former Vice-President Dick Cheney, Obama's expected decision to commit 30,000 more troops to the war will actually bring him more into line with conservatives than the rank-and-file of his own party. But the thoroughness and transparency of Obama's process will lay the foundation for support in Congress, support that will be essential given the increasing unpopularity of the war.

President Obama's approach exemplifies key "design principles" that research has revealed to be fundamental to effective executive decision-making:

Gather the right minds around the table. Decision-making is a process of converting inputs (knowledge, insight, potential support) into outputs (commitments and plans of action). As with all processes, the old maxim that "garbage in equals garbage out" very much applies to decision-making. You can't hope to get the right outcomes if you don't start with the right inputs. That's why gathering the right minds around the table is key. These minds must have the requisite range of expertise (knowledge of Afghan regional politics, counter-insurgency strategy, etc), range of opinion (both for and against committing more troops), as well as a range of cognitive orientation — creative minds and practical minds, analytical and values-driven, structured and flexible. As you decide whom to have at your decision-making table, then, keep in mind Machiavelli's admonition that, "The first opinion which one forms of a [leader] is by observing the men he has around him; and when they are capable and faithful he may always be considered wise."

Decide how you will decide. When the stakes are high, it's all too easy for decision-making to degenerate into positional bickering. When this happens, opportunities to reframe the problem, generate creative alternatives, and forge consensus agreements are lost. The result is either lowest-common-denominator comprises or deadlock. Effective executives avoid this by adopting structured approaches that parse decision-making into a set of distinct phases, starting with defining the problem, and proceeding through establishing criteria for evaluating potential outcomes, generating and testing alternatives, and finally reaching closure. The virtue of the phased approach is that it moves people through digestible experiences of education and adjustment, blunting the reflexive resort to position-taking, and avoiding premature convergence on an "obvious" solution.

Take care to define desired outcomes early (and don't lose sight of them). This is a corollary to the previous principle. One well-documented decision-trap is the tendency for the scope of decision-making either to expand dangerously (this is known as mission creep) or to get watered down (laboring mightily and giving birth to a mouse). The best antidote to scope drift is early definition of, and commitment to, a statement of desired outcomes. Is the goal in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban, and if so, over what time frame? Is it building civil society with the Afghan people? Is it buttressing stability in Pakistan? Is it getting U.S. troops home as quickly as possible? The resulting mission statement, along with supporting criteria for rigorously evaluating potential outcomes, provides an essential anchor for the hard work of option generation and deliberation.

Rest the ladder of inference on a firm foundation. The most dangerous things in the world are outdated assumptions. Assumptions, after all, are the foundation upon which the ladder of logical inference rests in decision-making. If "A" is true, "B" and "C" follow. But what if "A" is not true? What if "A" was once true, but no longer holds? For example, is Al Qaeda still the primary threat to U.S. interests in the region? It's essential to explicitly surface the fundamental assumptions that the people around the table are making, and to test their soundness with deep analysis. Done well, the result is a shared foundation of facts and hypotheses on which the group will build their decision-edifice.

Demand diversity of viewpoints. In Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer, Michael Roberto persuasively argues that leaders must actively foment disagreement to get good decisions. Too much agreement, too early in the process, is as dangerous as too little agreement later on. Why? Because it raises the specter that decision-makers have fallen prey to groupthink, the tendency for "conventional wisdom" to harden too quickly and crowd out divergent opinions. If leaders don't get enough disagreement naturally, Roberto suggests, then they should demand it by elevating the options of thoughtful minority viewpoints, or appointing a devil's advocate (Vice President Biden appears to have played this role in arguing for a more limited focus in the region) or engaging in scenario generating exercises or setting up a "red team" and a "blue team" to argue different viewpoints.

Know when and how to bring the process to closure. Finally, effective leaders know when and how to drive the process to closure and commitment. "Analysis paralysis" is an ever-present danger when potential outcomes are unpalatable. Deliberation can give way to dithering when the stakes are high and interests are powerful. So decision-makers like Obama have to set deadlines and other action-forcing events to bring the process to a conclusion. They must demand that everyone around the table support the outcome, even if there is not full consensus that it is the right way to go.

These principles of effective executive decision-making will help you to avoid the more obvious decision-traps and reach better conclusions. In the case of President Obama's deliberations on Afghanistan, his careful attention to the design of the decision process should contribute to saving lives and increasing our security.

Michael Watkins is the author of many books, including Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating and Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions