If you are a pundit, or get paid to watch trends, then this message doesn't apply to you. It's your job to go out and find the next shiny object that could influence how we live and do business.

But if you're in the trenches of an organization, my advice is to stop acting like or listening to pundits. Stop looking for the next Twitter. Why? It's simple—because the odds are you already have plenty of projects and ideas with proven potential that you need to improve on without worrying about the next thing you'll start. Here are a few thought-starters based on observations I've made about all of "yesterday's Twitters" that need some care and feeding before you start looking for the next Twitter. Perhaps some may hit close to home for you.

Your Website(s): Websites haven't been bright and shiny for years now; they're more de rigeur. But is yours really as good as it could be? Do search engines find it effortlessly? Is it usable? Does it even serve a purpose (is it useful)? Can you rapidly re-design it without it causing major upheaval within the departments of your organization? After reading how American Airlines struggles with the all too common problem of "design by committee" (which exists within many large organizations), I have to conclude that getting your website to completely satisfy business, brand and user goals is still elusive for many companies.

Your Blog(s): Your company is blogging. Congratulations. Is anyone listening? Blogging was the bright and shiny object of 2006-2008 and many companies found out just how hard it is to do well. Good blogging provides value. It is interesting and generates a healthy amount of comments and conversation which in turn generates a good dose of Google juice. It's also terribly difficult to sustain. It requires cultural shifts within an organization, and has to be prioritized (read: made part of someone's job). Frankly, I rarely see outstanding examples of a good company blog. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing (if it makes sense strategically), but doing it well is another story.

Your Intranet(s): Wow. Where do I begin? Intranets were bright and shiny several years ago, now they're more often the butt of water cooler jokes. How old is your intranet? When was the last time it was updated? Do your employees use it or have they, like many, engaged in IT mutiny, instead, basically sidestepping your internal system for Web 2.0 cloud based systems that allow them to work and collaborate the way they want to? If employees don't use the systems you've put in place, why? Fixing this system will do a lot more good than expending energy on finding the next Twitter. After all, if your company isn't functioning well internally, it's probably exhibiting problems externally, too.

Your Facebook, Twitter, Community Initiatives etc.: I'm lumping these ecosystems together because what's really important about them is that they all require high levels of engagement and participation from company representatives (unless the company is fortunate enough to be a "badge brand"). But the reality for many organizations is that they just aren't ready to directly engage with customers on the customers' turf. Tweeting requires a certain confidence that it's okay for your conversations to be public and companies who are customer centric such as Jet Blue tend to do well here. There's a good deal of interaction that happens on the Whole Foods Facebook page in addition to the expected promotions. Communities are delicate ecosystems and companies that want to be relevant there have to have representatives who are comfortable, at ease, who can deftly work these ecosystems. This has proven to be easier said than done for many.

By no means is this a complete list. But in whatever previously shiny object you own, the common thread is that a lack of vision, strategy, and ability to execute well limits the potential of an organization to be truly valuable to all of their constituents (customers, employees and business partners). So my advice for the non trend-watcher? Forget finding the next Twitter and start buffing up those previously shiny objects, the ones where your constituents need you today.

David Armano is part of the founding team at Dachis Group, an Austin-based consultancy delivering social business design services. He is both an active practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience design, and the social web. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/armano

By making simple decisions to buy or not buy, consumers have changed entire industries — banking, travel, cell phones. A little pressure from consumers typically produces a lot of innovation that shifts products, competition, prices, quality, choices, and ultimately value. The problem with healthcare is that it has been built around providers, insurers, the government, employers — and not around consumers. We've ended up with spiraling costs and few consumer choices, primarily because many of the regulations and mindsets governing health care have inhibited the kind of broad-scale consumer innovation that's happened in other industries.

Now, while the U.S. government is undertaking one of the biggest reform efforts in our history, the debate seems to be overlooking the essential element of consumers.

Consumers are important for two reasons:

1. They are ultimately responsible for their health. The majority of health decisions are made at home, and the daily choices individuals make can affect what everyone in the system pays for healthcare.
2. By arming them with the right information, consumers can make more informed decisions about how they want to spend their healthcare dollars, ultimately driving market innovation.

We see the result of the individual choices consumers make every day. Two-thirds of Americans are now considered overweight or obese, and obesity is one of the biggest risk factors for developing the six chronic diseases that account for 75% percent of America's current healthcare costs — including diabetes (costs to the system = $218 billion), cardiovascular disease and stroke (costs = $437.5 billion).

What's disconcerting is that this doesn't have to be our reality. Consumers can control and largely prevent obesity and chronic diseases through lifestyle changes and personal choices, such as exercising regularly, eating right, and not smoking. Research has shown that even a small change, such as losing 5-10 percent of body weight, can reduce the risk of suffering from a chronic illness. Walking half an hour a day, five days a week cuts the incidence of diabetes by 40 percent. According to the CDC, the average American adult (age 20 to 74) is 5'6 ¾", weighs 177.65 pounds and has a BMI of 28 (25-29.9 is considered overweight; 30 or higher is obese). To achieve a BMI of 24, America needs to lose 29 pounds per person. With more than 205 million people in the United States that means almost 6 billion pounds.

Not to sound trite, but collectively losing weight could be a "quick fix" for our health problems and rising costs of care — without legislation. Obese individuals incur 42% more in medical expenditures, which amounts to about $4,800 per person per year, compared with normal weight individuals, who incur an average of about $3,400 in such expenses.

Despite these facts, consumers continue to make harmful health choices that affect society as a whole. We need to help consumers engage with their health differently, be wiser purchasers, and better understand the trade-offs. As long as people believe the price of care is their co-pay and continue to engage as they have, there won't be sustainable reform.

A big part of the problem is that millions of Americans are insulated from the true cost of healthcare. Yet they're paying for it whether they realize it or not. They receive lower take-home wages so that employers can pay the premium on health insurance, lower take-home pay via the Medicare tax on wages, or higher prices on goods and services so that businesses can pay their insurance premiums and taxes. Because the majority of health benefits are provided through employer-sponsored programs, many consumers do not know (or care) how much their healthcare really costs. And because healthcare providers negotiate rates directly with health insurance companies, consumers don't know that one hospital might charge twice as much for the same procedure as another — only to achieve the same results. Even consumers who pay for healthcare out of their own pockets often don't know how much a procedure will cost until they have already undergone it and are on their way to recovery.

We could shift these trends by engaging consumers with increased transparency and more information with simple public education. So much can be done by healthcare professionals and the government to provide information on diseases and potential treatments, the cost of those treatments, the providers with the best track records for those procedures, and the trade-off between lifestyle choices and the cost of care. We need to encourage and reward general wellness by helping people to focus on health "management" throughout the course of their lives.

When you combine the disconnect between lifestyle choices and the burden it places on the system as well as the hidden costs of providing healthcare, it's clear that we have created a situation in which our most powerful drivers of change — American consumers — have been incapacitated. Only by providing consumers with the right information at the right time can we re-empower them.

Healthcare is not going to be reformed by simply revising the current system, which is centered on providers. Instead, we need to concentrate on re-engineering healthcare around the consumer, building innovative approaches that can help consumers take more control of their ongoing care. After all, the ultimate success of healthcare reform will depend on consumers changing their behaviors and interactions with the healthcare system as much as it will on the legislation under consideration in Washington, DC.

Peter Neupert is the Corporate Vice President in charge of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft, a group providing software innovations that empower users and enable transformation to improve health.

The problem with claiming that your company is (or aspires to be) carbon or water neutral is that it's impossible to be either. No company can fully eliminate its carbon or water footprint. Sure, it can improve its resource use, reduce emissions, and then buy offsets. But offsets have come under increased scrutiny and criticism, and several companies have backed away from using them. The danger, then, with claiming carbon or water neutrality is that it's misleading, and risks violating consumers' (or other stakeholders') trust. The issues around carbon neutrality claims are well understood, but they apply as well to water.

Consider The Coca-Cola Company's experience. While Coca-Cola has made progress in reducing its global water use this has been overshadowed by its controversial claim that it's striving to achieve water neutrality. How, consumers reasonably ask, can a company whose products are mostly water ever become "water neutral"?

Part of the consumer confusion comes from misunderstanding what the company means by "water-neutral." The problem lies within the water-neutral definition and framework as adopted by six organizations in 2007; Twente University, World Wildlife Fund, The Coco-Cola Company, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Water Neutral/Emvelo Group and UNESCO-IHE. Under that definition, achieving water neutrality requires:

1. Defining, measuring, and reporting one's "water footprint;"
2. Taking all action that is "reasonably possible" to reduce the existing operational water footprint;
3. Reconciling the residual water footprint (the amount remaining after a company does as much as possible to reduce footprint) by making a "reasonable investment" in establishing or supporting projects that focus on the sustainable and equitable use of water."

That last point amounts to a version of water offsetting — something akin to the controversial practice of carbon offsetting. But water is not carbon and the concept of offsets doesn't translate well to water.

Why? Under the framework of water offsetting, a manufacturing operation can withdraw water in one water basin and replenish it in another. Clearly this isn't water neutral for the basin that's tapped, a critical point for people who depend on the basin.

While the definition and framework is a useful tool for companies to think about water, claiming water neutrality according to this definition only confuses consumers and is likely to generate skepticism, not support. They don't care about (or really understand) a definition agreed upon by a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and companies. If a company claims water neutrality, they expect to see just that — a gallon of fresh water returned to the source from which it is taken. And that's unlikely to happen.

Don't get me wrong — companies that are trying to reduce their water use and invest in water basin conservation projects have the right goals. But don't run the risk of distracting from real progress in reducing your water footprint by stating goals that are difficult to understand and impossible to accomplish. Rather, you should reduce water use, invest in local, community-based watershed projects, and tout those accomplishments. That way, you can take credit for credible actions.

William Sarni is founder and CEO of DOMANI and has 30 years of experience in providing sustainability and environmental consulting services to private and public sector enterprises.

When an insolvent AIG paid out $165 million in executive bonuses, the public was outraged. But that is peanuts compared to the $62 billion AIG has quietly paid out to settle its obligations with some of the world's largest banks. Last week, the details of this settlement were finally disclosed.

The financial products subsidiary of AIG had sold these banks a huge volume of credit default swaps (CDS) — obligations of AIG to pay the full face value of designated bonds if the issuers were to default. Many of these bonds were backed by mortgages, whose values deteriorated sharply during the summer of 2008. In response, AIG executives tried to persuade these banks to settle its CDS obligations at a 40 percent discount to the face value of the relevant bonds.

Then, on September 16, 2008, the federal government took over almost 80 percent of AIG's stock in return for an $85 billion line of credit, which was later increased to over $180 billion in other loans and investments.

During the first week of November, 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — with the current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as its then president — took over the negotiations with the large banks owning CDS contracts with AIG. After a week of negotiations, the New York Fed instructed AIG to settle these CDS contracts by paying the full face value of all the relevant bonds — $62 billion, as compared to their then market value of less than $30 billion.

In my view, these $62 billion in AIG payments were unjustified gifts to sophisticated investors, who had made an error of investment judgment in choosing a weak counterparty for their CDS contracts. The choice of appropriate counterparties is a critical component of risk management at all financial institutions. Even the vice-chair of the New York Fed admitted that the payments "will reduce their incentive to be careful in the future."

Moreover, no one disclosed the existence of these huge payments by AIG until March of 2009, when the US Senate Banking Committee pressed for some details about the AIG settlement. More information emerged last week in a report by a federal auditor, who wrote that the New York Fed "refused to use its considerable leverage" to negotiate discounts with AIG's counterparties. According to Janet Tavakoli, an expert on structured finance, "There is no way they should have paid at par (face value). AIG was basically bankrupt."

If the New York Fed had threatened to put the financial products subsidiary of AIG into bankruptcy, the counterparties would probably have agreed to settle their CDS contracts with AIG at 70 or 80 cents on a dollar. After filing for bankruptcy, the AIG subsidiary would have been allowed to repudiate all its CDS contracts subject to a court-approved reorganization plan. Most investors would accept discounts to settle CDS contracts now, rather than roll the dice in a lengthy legal proceeding.

Since federal officials have not explained why they chose to pay in full instead of negotiating discounts, we can only speculate. One theory is that the US Treasury wanted to provide financial assistance to foreign banks suffering the fallout of the American credit crisis. These foreign banks received roughly $40 billion of the $62 billion in payouts from AIG. Perhaps this was an indirect way to achieve the US Treasury's objective since Congress would not authorize a direct bailout of foreign banks.

There are conspiracy theories as well. Some observers point out that Stephen Friedman, the chairman of the New York Fed, is a director of Goldman Sachs. Goldman received almost $13 billion in settlement from AIG and Friedman bought 50,000 shares of Goldman shortly after the federal takeover of AIG. Goldman claims that it was fully hedged against any losses if AIG had failed, but the reliability of these hedges has been questioned by the federal auditor.

Why do you think the New York Fed acted the way it did in dealing with the large exposure of AIG to CDS contracts on mortgage-backed bonds? What do you think the Fed could or should have done instead?

Bob Pozen is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the author of Too Big to Save? How to Fix the US Financial System

In the United States, the national Thanksgiving holiday is a powerful time-compressor. It supposedly celebrates a history of sharing the bounty with immigrants or natives (depending on one's side of the table), beginning in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. But in practice it celebrates being able to fit as many commercial activities as possible into one very short period. That alone can be stressful.

On Thanksgiving Day, people take to their cars and crowd the highways to rush to a family dinner (if they haven't crowded the skies the day before). Thanksgiving audiences for TV football are probably second only to Super Bowl Sunday (a made-up national holiday from clever NFL marketers). The day after Thanksgiving has traditionally been the biggest single shopping day of the year, when retailers rake it in, inducing crowds to line up at 5am for heavily-discounted early bird specials. While some family dinners might appear to stretch on endlessly (a function of how one feels about relatives), the holiday time itself is very short. Many people seem to think of all the pieces of work to save to get done over Thanksgiving, as though it were a really big break instead of a teensy time-out that not everyone gets anyway.

So there's a lot of modern frenzy surrounding what undoubtedly started out in the 1800s as a nice day off with family while recalling the squash of 1621. One way to get through the frenzy is to follow some very simple tips.

• Lower expectations. Everything won't get done. It doesn't have to be perfect. There will be another sale. There will be another football game. If just a few small items are crossed off the list, that is a start in the right direction.
• Volunteer. Food kitchens, churches, synagogues, or community service groups are always looking for volunteers to serve shut-ins or the poor.
• Bring a sense of humor. Tell funny stories. Keep it light. The cliche that "laughter is the best medicine" might be over-used by Readers' Digest, but it is true nonetheless.
• Collaborate. Whatever the goal, having partners makes it easier to achieve. That works in the kitchen, at the table, and at work.
• Find reasons to say Thank You. Before doing anything else, make a list of nice things that have happened and who was part of them. Write notes thanking people at work or home for something they didn't even know was noticed.
• Focus on a future goal. Have something satisfying to look forward to Monday morning. Envision the year ahead.

Come to think of it, these are also good tips for surviving recessions, flu season, and stress at the office. Thank goodness we can save time by re-purposing these lessons.

A tweeting CEO is a terrific asset. It puts a human face (and voice) to the company's leadership and it demonstrates the executive team's commitment to customers. And unlike blogging, tweeting imposes relatively light demands on a CEO's precious time.

For some leaders, being on Twitter is a necessary way to stay in touch with key audiences and issues. Arguably, the CEO of any company in the tech, communications or media industries (or with clients and customers in those industries) should be on Twitter. For CEOs in any other sector Twitter is strictly optional--though CEOs who are always and can't put down the Blackberry or iPhone will likely take to it with ease.

Once you've determined that your CEO is a good Twitter candidate, here are 10 practices and tools that can make you make your boss an effective Twitterer and thus open a new communications channel with your customers:

1. Ease into it. Your CEO needs to get a feel for Twitter before tweeting. Set up an anonymous/pseudonymous account that follows a few dozen CEOs, public figures, friends and colleagues. After your CEO has monitored it for a few weeks it will be much easier to see what makes a good tweet.
2. Download it. Most people find Twitter much more useful if they use a client program like Tweetdeck, Tweetie or Seesmic. Set up your CEO with one of these, especially if you think your CEO may use more than one account (see below) be sure to choose a client that supports multiple accounts.
3. Don't fake it. Your CEO should write and post her own tweets, in a first-person voice. It's acceptable and appropriate for one or two other communications staffers to have access to your CEO's account, but they should use that access only to post informational links about your CEO (speaking notes, videos, announcements of upcoming appearances) and not to post thoughts, observations or other updates. There's nothing worse for your CEO's Twitter credibility than a tweet that mysteriously posts while he is on stage, delivering a speech--or worse yet, supposed to be paying attention to someone else's
4. Connect it. If your CEO also blogs, those posts can be tweeted through his account automatically with the service Twitterfeed.
5. Save it. Write now and tweet later using a service like HootSuite. Your CEO can use that middle-of-the-night insomnia to tee up some quotes, insights or observations, and then set them to publish sometime during the next day (when people are awake to read them). Conversely, if you have a global audience, you may want to set some of your CEO's tweets to detonate after hours, so that your employees on the other side of the world will see them.
6. Manage it. Create a "twitter fodder" file. Include lists of possible tweets (quotes, observations, kudos to team members, etc.) and a list of twitterers to follow as a source of retweetable material. Encourage your CEO to retweet or reply to messages on a regular basis, so that at least 1/3 of his Twitter feed feels conversational.
7. Shout about it. Publicize your CEO's tweeting by adding her username to her business card, e-mail signature and online bio. Make sure your employees, vendors, clients and colleagues know that this is a good way to keep in touch with your CEO, and set expectations for whether and how often they might expect personal replies.
8. Monitor it. Assign a communications staff person to the job of monitoring your CEO's Twitter activity. Your monitor should use an RSS reader or Twitter client to track all tweets that include your CEO's username, and assume responsibility for replying to routine inquiries; if your CEO is following more than a handful of people (which they should!) your monitor will need direct access to the CEO account in order to keep on top of Direct Messages, too. Your CEO is likely to get certain kinds of messages on a regular basis (for example, requests for jobs or investment information) so agree on a set of standard responses that your monitor can send from the company account. For example: "Thanks for asking @CEOName about jobs at @CompanyName. You can find info about our current openings here: http://company.com/hr."
9. Divvy it. Consider setting up multiple accounts, potentially including a separate account for personal use, one for replies (if they won't be interesting for other people to read) and one for the company (to use for posting company news, or for responding to tweets your CEO doesn't have time to answer).
10. Don't Auotmate it. Resist the temptation to auto-follow or auto-reply. While Twitter has now disabled most forms of auto-reply, you'll still find people who automate a "thanks for following me" message. Don't use any kind of boilerplate on your CEO's feed. If you need to use standard replies (for example to job inquiries) those should come from a separate staff or company account.

We recently asked our leadership to bring a memento to a recent company meeting that reminds them of a time when they were at their best as a leader, parent, spouse or teammate. People arrived carrying everything from a ragged bible to a coffee mug. When the stories began, they were powerful and emotional.

One woman held up a prayer card from her mother's funeral. She described her mother's rough start in life: she was abused by her father and ran away from home in her early teens. She described her mother not as a victim, but as a survivor who scraped her way through secretarial school to support herself. She married and had nine children and numerous grandchildren. "She did not look back with regret and blame. She lived a life of optimism and found her purpose was to give her children a strong sense of being able to weather any storm," the woman told her team. "She influenced my own purpose and direction. Because of her, I strive to be a great mother and a productive, accountable, and self-reliant person and employee."

We all have personal stories that define our purpose and direction in life. The question becomes, is that personal purpose aligned with the purpose of your organization?

It is the leaders of the organization who must make sure that the company's purpose is clearly defined and understood, fostered and reinforced. If leaders also encourage employees to understand their own purpose and direction and how it connects with the company's, employee engagement, personal satisfaction and performance increase.

In his book, It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For, Roy M. Spence Jr. writes something we have been coaching CEOs and executive leaders on for 30 years: "A real purpose can't just be words on paper. It has to get under the skin of every member of your organization....If you get it right, people will feel great about what they're doing, clear about their goals, and excited to get to work every morning." This is especially important in turbulent times. At Senn Delaney, we took steps — like the show-and-tell exercise above — to keep that purpose in sight during the past 18 months.

Dupont CEO Ellen Kullman talked about the importance of purpose during tough times at Wharton's 2009 annual Leadership Conference when she was describing her crisis leadership principles. She was surprised during weekly informal meetings with employees that the "number one question was about whether we are going to stick with our mission." She realized that people were scared and wanted clear direction. "Making sure that people understand the mission — and linking their daily activities to the company's broader purpose — is essential to reducing fear, maintaining morale and keeping employees motivated," she said.

The economic meltdown has provided us with many lessons from leaders of embattled companies and they all point to one clear approach for success: Leaders must keep their company's purpose alive and in the forefront.

Here are some questions to consider as you examine whether you are bringing your purpose to life in your company and the marketplace:

• Do your employees know what the company's purpose really is?
• Do they feel like they have a personal connection to that purpose and their role in achieving it?
• Do your clients and customers clearly understand your purpose and what it means to them?
• Are you willing to make the hard decisions that need to be made to remain true to your organization's purpose?

As leaders, it is our job to leverage purpose to affect real change. A key element of leadership is to inspire. In order to impact people several levels below you, leaders must create a level of inspiration that will galvanize employees in a direction and create a "magnetic north" for them to move towards.

Where does that inspiration come from? Some leaders believe they can inspire others through charisma. This can be true in the short term, but, I liken this approach to serving appetizers; they satisfy briefly, then make your employees are hungry again. By clarifying your company's true purpose "how it makes a real difference in the lives of others", and then connecting your personal leadership purpose to that broader company purpose, you will be able inspire employees in a more meaningful, lasting way.

Jim Hart is president and CEO of Senn Delaney, an international firm that is widely recognized as the leading authority and practitioner in the field of culture shaping. Prior to becoming president of Senn Delaney, Jim founded a leading business software publishing firm that twice earned positions on Inc. Magazine's 500 list of the Fastest Growing Companies. He is the co-author of Winning Teams — Winning Cultures.