You tend to hear the same company lines over and over.

“We have to focus on taking care of existing business first.”  “It pays the bills.”

“Chasing new ideas has to take a back seat to keeping the lights on.”  Etc, etc, etc…

I’ve been thinking about this line of reasoning lately.

I think new ideas for a company are as important as water is to life.  Without new ideas, your business dies.  Maybe not at first.  A company might be able to do things the same way and last for years.  But without constant attention to fostering the future, eventually you run out of future.

Take the American auto industry for example.  The “Big Three” have done things the same way for a long time because it worked for a long time.  They didn’t give enough attention to new ideas, new trends, and new demands.  And we, the tax payers, are going to pay dearly for their mistakes.  In fact, I think we are currently witnesses the disintegration of the free market system our country is built on (but I’ll save that for another day).

My point is that the U.S. auto industry should have been coming up with new ideas for sustainable transportation for the past 20 years.  Instead, they focused on building big Saudi-oil guzzling SUV’s because that’s what was selling at the moment.  Now they’re scrambling (and failing) to to come up with a plan for the future.

What are you doing everyday to generate and pursue new ideas?

A few weeks ago, we went to a Christmas party at the home of some of my favorite people in the world.  We always have a blast–especially this year.  The food was amazing and their house is perfect for entertaining.  Everyone had a great time.

This couple’s net worth is more than most people could accumulate in 10 lifetimes.  But what I love about them is how unassuming they are.  Despite their wealth, they drive average used cars, rarely eat at fancy restaurants, and, as I discovered coincidentally the other night, they eat generic breakfast cereal.

Why would they do this?  Why would a couple whose finances are in no way affected by the cost of name brand verses generic choose to buy generic?  I highly doubt they just like the generic cereal more.

I think the reason they choose the cheaper cereal has to do with a deeply rooted financial discipline.  A discipline that we, consumerism-crazed Americans, have lost.  We fantasize about wealth as a means to the good life, to have the finer things, to finally not have to settle for inferior products (Darn it, I want Lucky Charms, not Marshmallow Mateys!)

But this couple CAN afford the finer things, yet they choose not to.  And I’m not just talking about buying name brand breakfast cereal.  They could afford just about anything, yet the discipline they have in making big financial decisions trickles all the way down to the smallest decisions.

A lifetime of small decisions makes all the difference, in finances and in life.

Our company helps film a reality television show called 17 Kids and Counting with the Duggar family.  The show airs on TLC on Monday nights.

A few weeks ago, TLC sent a film crew to Tontitown, Arkansas to capture footage for some new network promos (the promos are also for John and Kate Plus Eight and Little People, Big World).  Bunker New York is the company that did the production.  They did an amazing job as you can see here:

TLC Promo - Click on the image to watch

The cinematography is absolutely incredible and it has really inspired our team.  And although our only contribution to the promos was fetching food for the crew, our team did have a hand in making the show itself a success.

Have you ever been in a situation where something outrageous happened yet no one said a word because everyone knew what you were thinking?  This happens all the time in environments with strong emotional undercurrents.

It seems like the tide creating the undercurrent is usually one or two emotionally unintelligent and socially unaware individuals.  These people don’t realize the undercurrent is there because they lack the ability to recognize it.

If left unmanaged, emotional undercurrents can create big rifts between groups of people.  It can also breed a culture of gossip, frustration and sarcasm.

I’m reading a book right now called ‘Primal Leadership’ by Daniel Goleman.

Goleman talks about two kinds of leadership; resonant and dissonant.

Resonant leaders know how to make their teams “resonate” by getting people on the same wavelength emotionally. Synchronous vibration.  When the team is in synch with each other and in synch with their leader, “people feel a mutual comfort level.  They share ideas, learn from one another, make decisions collaboratively, and get things done.  They form an emotional bond that helps them stay focused even amid profound change and uncertainty.”

Dissonant leaders on the other hand lack the ability to create harmony among the team.  They often create a toxic environment where people feel afraid and apathetic.  All of us know people like this.  What Goleman found is that most of these leaders don’t mean to be this way; they simply lack the critical emotional intelligence abilities to be a resonant leader.  Goleman refers to some dissonant leaders as “clueless,” as they “try to resonate in a positive tone but are out of touch with the unpleasant fact that their subordinates are stuck in a negative emotional register.  In other words, the organizational reality makes people angry or anxious or otherwise unhappy, but the leader remains oblivious and so sends an upbeat message that resonates with no one.”

I think one of the best ways to be a resonant leader is to listen, really listen, to what people say and especially what they don’t say.  This is hard because we like to be heard more than we like to hear.  We like to have the right answers.  We like to be the hero.  We like attention.  But if you want to resonate with people, you have to know what they think and how they feel.  If you don’t know what tune they’re in, you can’t haromonize.

For simplicity’s sake, just listen at least twice as much as you talk.

A couple of weekends ago, Jameson and I built a track for some digital film projects we are working on.

The current projects are actually for our company, but we decided to go ahead and spend our time and money to build this piece of equipment.  For about $100 and 7 hours of labor, we built something that instantly took our cinematography capability to a whole new level.

The question I keep asking myself is, why in the 20 year history of the company has no one set aside a weekend and built this elemental component of film making?

Please know that I am in no way questioning the motivation of our employees, in fact, I’m asking myself why it took me six years to decide to do this.

I think the answer has a lot to do with culture.  Our culture has changed dramatically in the past two years and especially in the past six months.  We’ve seen 15 and 20 year employees leave and new people join the team.  We’re experiencing shifts in our core customers.  We’re all a little uncomfortable.  Yet through all of this uncomfortable change, something exciting is happening.  It is palpable.  You can hear it, feel it, see it and taste it throughout the day.  Not everyone is comfortable with it, but everyone understands that if we want to survive we have to change.

A culture of survival is very motivating.  Motivating enough for me to give up a weekend and a little cash out of my pocket to make darn sure we did everything possible to not only survive, but to change the future of our company.

Passion and manage are two words that don’t go together.

I’m often asked why I let people do the things they do.  I don’t see how I can’t let them do it.

I’m often asked why I don’t step in and “manage” the situation when an idea breaks loose and things get a little crazy.  I don’t see how I can’t let that go on.

Does it always create positive ROI?  Of course not.  It’s not suppose to.  But when a job comes in the door that does pay the bills, you can bet passionate people will give the client more for their money.

If you want to squelch creativity, come up with a passion management plan.

Let me know how it works out.

In order to frame much of what you will read on this blog, I thought it might be helpful to share the story of my journey over the past six years. (For your sake, this will be the Reader’s Digest version).  I do have a story before the past six years, but I’ll save that for a later post.

For six years I have been working with a creative media production company in downtown Siloam Springs, Arkansas called Gray Communications.

About two years after I started as an intern, I was given the opportunity to help develop and launch a new line of DVD resources known as Freedom Begins Here.  The project began as a training curriculum for counselors to help people with sexual addictions.  I have absolutely no counseling education or experience, nor do I have any desire to get any (I have enough student loan debt as it is).  What I do have is a passion to change culture through media.  Plus, it’s always interesting the reaction I get from people who ask what I do.  I usually respond with, “I make videos about pornography.”  I’m sure some of them regret asking.

Admittedly, training counselors on sexual addiction at first may not seem earth shattering, but the recent outflow of this project has the potential to impact literally millions of people.

What we found through our work on this project is a deeply embedded social issue that the church is largely ignoring.  For instance, in a recent survey, 50% of Christian men and 20% of Christian women indicated they feel addicted to pornography.  Another study by Christianity Today found that 7 out of 10 lay leaders in the church look at pornography once a week and 4 out of 10 pastors do the same.  How is that possible?

The issue is two fold.  First, pornography is now a part of everyday life.  It is “normal” at least in mainstream culture (which a lot Christians emulate).  We don’t have to seek it out, it comes to us.  If we want it, we can find absolutely any kind of porn in limitless quantities in absolute secrecy without paying a dime for it.  Combine that with the second issue, that Christians have done a horrible job educating and equipping ourselves and our children about sex and presto we have one of the largest crises of our time.

Alright, back to the story.  We released the counseling curriculum and quickly realized that training counselors was only a small part of addressing this epidemic.

So, we partnered with Dr. Gary Smalley and Ted Cunningham to offer individuals, couples, families, churches and small groups a series of DVD Toolkits to face the crisis of pornography and sexual sin.

We made that decision about two years ago.  We thought that because pornography was such a huge issue, and because we had a “name,”  people would quickly embrace a relevant solution to overcoming it.  Boy were we wrong.

The past two years have been the most challenging years of my life.  We’re trying to launch a product that almost everyone needs but almost no one wants.  We might as well be trying to get people excited enough to talk about a cure for a venerial disease.  You don’t hear a lot of people walking around saying, “Hey, I was addicted to pornography but this product helped me.”  It’s a very private yet widespread issue.

But despite all of the setbacks and challenges we’ve experienced some incredible breakthroughs and accomplishments.

People told us that self-publishing DVDs was next to impossible.  They said if we wanted to get our products into retail we would have to sign with a publisher which means if we make it big, the publisher looks like a genius and reaps huge rewards.  If it flops, they ship thousands of unsold pieces of product back to us and we all go home.  Turns out, we couldn’t get a publisher to even notice us anyway and distributors viewed us as an anomaly.

So we are going it alone.

We built a team of seasoned professionals from retail, banking, and production to get Freedom Begins Here off the ground.  Every person who joined the team made extreme sacrifices in salary and job security.  They came because of the vision that we all share; to change culture through media.

The crazy thing is that our plan is beginning to work.  After four years of clawing for traction, we are seeing the fruit of our labor.  We are still far from profitability, but we now see a path to success where before it looked more like a jungle.

You know, life can be very mysterious.

If someone told me six years ago that I would help create a DVD series on the topic of pornography, I probably would have dismissed them immediately.  The funny thing is, someone DID tell me that.  But it wasn’t six years ago, it was more like twelve.  I was at a high school basketball game.  Sitting next to me was a woman I had never met before.  Somehow we started chatting and she asked me what I wanted to do with my life.  At the time, I was just becoming interested in digital media.  The Internet was still in its infancy, but it was far enough along for people to realize that online pornography was becoming a problem.  This woman, whom I’d never met before in my life, suggested I use my interest in digital media to help alleviate this problem.  Honestly, I didn’t even remember our conversation until about a year ago when I was well into the Freedom Begins Here project.  That memory sat dormant somewhere in the neurons of my brain for all that time.  Remembering it was first of all an absolute miracle (if you know me, you know how bad my memory is) and it kind of validate things for me.

That should get you up to speed for now.  I’m sure I will post more about this journey later.

I have decided to start a blog.

Not because it is the “in” thing to. Not because I want everyone in the world to know what I’m doing every second of the day.

I started a blog so I can have a place to publish my experiences. In business and in life. This blog will mainly be about my adventures as a young business person. I have been blessed and challenged with great entrepreneurial responsibility at a young age. I feel compelled to share the things I am learning with anyone who might benefit from hearing about my failures, successes, processes and hang ups.

I’ve never had an official “mentor,” someone who took me under their wing and taught me how to do business. There are several business people I am close to and respect very much, but no one who has been particularly interested in developing me as a leader. And honestly, I’ve never purposefully sought a mentor relationship.

All of that to say that this blog will become a place where I can share with you what I’m learning and hopefully provide you with insight on your journey in business and in life. For me, it just helps to process things in written form.

I would tell you what to expect in my posts, but I’m really not sure what to expect myself. My inspiration and experiences ebb and flow, and so will this blog.

One thing that is constant about me…I always question the status quo.

Thank you for reading. I look forward to bringing you something (anything) of value.