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I hear a lot about the “ROI of Social Media” these days, and every time I do, I cringe.

Over last 27 years I’ve done a ton of ROI calculations determining if an investment of “X” in something (call it “Y“) could, or did,  produce an adequate return on that investment, based on predetermined thresholds.

So, if my threshold was 10%, and my X investment in Y returned 12%, I was either good to go or popping a champagne cork.

Let’s now consider “Social Media“.     Here’s my first problem - most people aren’t buying these platforms, that is, unless you are a venture capitalist that owns a piece of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,  or anything else out there.

They are just USING them.  For free (or pretty close to it).

There goes the “X”, because  there’s no investment,  and the “Y”, because there is no something that has been bought - in one fell swoop.

And thus, the cringe.

What Then, Is A Better Value Evaluator?

I believe a far better way to characterize the potential value of using Social Media is to look at its Utility.

That is, its “fitness for some purpose or worth to some end” (thank you Webster’s dictionary).

Because when you get right down to it, as I’ve said in this space before, Social Media is just another way for humans to communicate.  Right up there with television, e-mail, texting, telephones (wireless and wireline), morse code, tin cans and good ‘ol snail mail.

What’s more, we have (at least) a million potential “ends” for communication - and if you pay close enough attention to your social media streams, you’ll see quite a lot of them.

Pick An End, Any End

For this exercise, let’s just pick one of them, one that I’m pretty familiar with -customer service.

To provide the kind of customer service I want (where the level of satisfaction is such that the lifetime value of those customers is maximized), I need to communicate well.  I need to be available to my customers to talk about their problems, discuss their bills, take payments,  sell services, or even talk about the weather.

I need forms of communication that work well towards that end - they need to have high Utility to me.

The Utility Test

Now let’s put Social Media to the customer service utility test.   On the positive side, it’s probably already being used by  a significant number of my customers, which combined with the relative ease of using the tool means that we have good accessibility.    Next, the negatives - this communication is being done “in public” (so good and bad is exposed),  with inherent limitations on the expansiveness of our discourse (i.e. to use Twitter as an example, I only have 140 characters).

The bottom line on Social Media’s Utility for customer service?   I believe it is poor-to-marginal- we can score some PR points for “being there” and showing empathy and courtesy, but when it comes to actually solving problems and answering questions in a meaningful way, we’ll end up “moving the conversation” to the traditional means anyway (most likely through a telephone, or a face-to-face discussion).

With this Utility determined, I can put it up against the Utility of all the other forms of customer service communications and allocate my resources accordingly (which means we won’t be shutting down our call center anytime soon).

This is just one example - I could also put Social Media through its Utility paces for me personally - and given the way I use it, I’d give it high marks for finding and forging friendships, promoting my blogging activities, learning more about the world I live in,  and indulging my love of  music and music trivia.

Now About That Screwdriver…..

What I hope is apparent here is that Utility carries with it a large doses of subjectivity and personal preference -things that are hard to measure on a pure objective scale (like an ROI), but really should be evaluated when deciding whether or not to use something.

Which is the beauty of assessing Utility for Social Media- it just boils down to, how well does it work as a means to your end?   And within that beauty lies the reason behind the ever-growing popularity of the medium - its seemingly endless number of uses for a corresponding number of ends.

It’s just another tool in the communications toolbox - and when was the last time you tried to calculate the ROI of a screwdriver?

Think Utility instead, and send the ROI back to your stock portfolio.

Remember the old Smith Barney commercial with John Houseman?  In it he uttered one of those unforgettable lines that will forever be emblazoned in my memory:

“Smith Barney - they make money the old-fashioned way - they eaaaaaarn it”

I was thinking about that line a lot lately, and the significance of “earning”.

The dictionary defines earn “to receive as return for effort” and “to come to be duly worthy of“.

In other words, when we truly “earn”, it was undoubtedly the result of a great deal of time and energy devoted to something.

Most of the time we think of this as getting paid for our labor, but there are other things we earn that are far more compelling when it comes to our daily lives:

Like, among many other things,

• Respect
• Trust
• Love
• Admiration
• Friendship
• Knowledge
• Recognition
• Accomplishment
• Mastery (or Best in Field)
• Trophies (or Championships)
• Readers
• Customers
• Smiles

Think about how much more fulfilling some of these “earnings” are because you had to work so hard at them - when the effort itself made the difference.

The best way I can illustrate this is climbing a mountain.  The top of a peak is just another point of latitude and longitude on this big planet, but yet standing at that point is far more valuable to most than standing on a street corner.  Why?  Because of what it took to get there.

I found another example in the newspaper over the weekend - it was a teenager named Shanequa who had just graduated from high school and was the first person in her family to be accepted into college.

Here’s how she described the experience (as told to columnist Bob Herbert):

“It has been very difficult. I had my ups and downs. There were some bad days, but I fought through them. My teachers were always pushing me: ‘Shanequa, you can do it. Don’t give up.’  When the acceptance letters started coming in the mail, I was like, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I wish I could do it all over again just to get the letters in the mail that said, ‘Shanequa, congratulations, you have been accepted at this university.’ ”

What Shanequa earned was well worth the big effort.

And then there’s Major Dick Winters. It was the 65th anniversary of D-day yesterday, and Major Winters was one of those men who so bravely landed and fought on the Normandy beaches, among those famous “Band Of Brothers”.  I’ve written about him (and his book) on this blog, and I thought about him again today as I reflected on “earning”.

He came to mind because of all the things he’s earned in his lifetime, the one thing that was the most fulfilling to him was the respect of his fellow soldiers, achieved by a lot of hard work, sacrifice, courage, and selflessness.

And thus I stumbled yet again onto another “Secret of life” - Part III, actually.

My first and second discoveries melded their way into this:

“Never grow up, and never give up”.

To that, I now add this (with apologies to John Houseman):

“Achieve fulfillment the old-fashioned way - earn it”

Indeed, we are what we earn- and there really aren’t any short cuts.

“Even though you’ve grasped the bar,

you still need to pull yourself over it”

Picture you are a researcher, looking over one of the most comprehensive long-term studies of human behavior.  You spend 42 years with nearly 270 men, studying their lives.

While the human mystery generates 270 different stories that, on the surface, defy any explanation, one fundamental truth comes out - relationships are absolutely critical to happiness.

“Happiness is Love; full stop” you proclaim.

Now that you’ve made this discovery, you can now find your own happiness, and live blissfully for the rest of your life.

Well, not exactly.

It doesn’t always work that way.  It didn’t work for George Vaillant, the actual researcher who oversaw the famous “Grant Study” of those 270 people.

David Brooks recently wrote about Vaillant and the study in the NY Times, in response to a longer piece about it entitled “What Makes Us Happy” written by Joshua Wolf in the Atlantic.

I read these articles and could easily imagine the utter frustration that would result from having the proverbial firm grasp on the happiness bar, but not being able to pull yourself over it.

It’s a vivid and classic illustration of what Brooks calls “the complexity of human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute“.

On the other hand, there are millions of people, I’m sure, who “practice happiness” without the benefit of a scientific study to prove they are doing the right thing.  They jumped over the bar without even knowing there was a bar to jump in the first place.

This leads to a question that has been attempted to be answered by many, many philosophers, teachers, book writers, bloggers, and life coaches- can happiness be taught?

Perhaps what the study reveals is a better question- if good relationships are critical to happiness, isn’t it really the relationship skills themselves that hold the key, and thus we as a society should be paying much more attention to this in our children’s formidable learning years?

That seemed to be Vaillant’s problem - he had a rough childhood and developed a real fear of intimacy, a fear that not even the full compelling force of a preponderance of data could overcome.

There, alas, is the conflict for the ages - the battle between logic and emotion.

While that battle cannot always be won, we can at least arm ourselves with yet another strong piece of evidence that relationships really, really matter.

And for those of us that are able to actively cultivate them we can perhaps not only keep ourselves over the bar, but pull many more people over with us.

Because a happier world is a better world.

Steve Farber is quite the dreamer when it comes to defining great leadership.

What I’ve always admired about him was his willingness to aim high - like for example, in his book “The Radical Edge“, where he dared to believe that we could mix great business with personal joy and in the process, “change the world“.

It’s not often that leaders try to think that way, but Steve challenged us to do that, passionately and eloquently.

But that wasn’t quite enough - there was more for him to say about leadership, something of an even higher calling and purpose

That something was love.

Now that’s really a radical leap - linking love and leadership. More precisely, Steve sees leadership as a selfless act of love - much like a parent and child.

This constitutes the core of his latest book, “Greater Than Yourself“ - the concept that leaders should “go beyond the tenets of the Golden Rule and help others to be better than they are themselves“.

Just like a mother or father expressing their love by doing everything they can to make their child’s future better than their own, Steve sees great leadership through much the same lens- and in a much more personal way than conventional leadership wisdom usually dictates.

Through the same “business parable” style he employed in his other two books (including “The Radical Edge“),   Steve himself tells the tale of a special guitar, and how his search for one of its previous owners slowly reveals the “Greater Than Yourself” philosophy (and a framework to use it) through a cast of dedicated practitioners.

It’s a fast, enjoyable read, and the use of storytelling brings his points home very effectively.    The author’s passion for the subject clearly comes through - I didn’t doubt for a second that he truly believes that what he presented represented “true” leadership, on its highest plane of existence.

The real test however, is whether his readers will believe it, and ultimately reach for it.  He ups the ante by presenting an Epilogue to the book that shows the principles in action (by the group Up With People), and also invites us to a new website where he is taking on his own “GTY” projects.

That’s where the rubber meets the road - can we too become so selfless, so loving, and so giving as leaders, like the characters in the book? The answer lies inside our own hearts and souls.

I’m sure Steve knew the degree of difficulty he faced here,  but this didn’t stop him from putting his personal feelings on his literary sleeve and trying to penetrate those inner sanctums that rarely see the light of day between 8 and 5, Monday through Friday.

I for one am quite glad he did. Read this book and I bet you’ll feel the same way too.

(Note: This is the latest in a continuing series of posts on Leadership. I am a constantly learning 25-year student of Leadership and am happy to share my ideas, experiences and knowledge - please visit my Leadership tab for other posts on this topic)

If there’s any silver lining in our current economic meltdown, you can find it in the newspapers and online.   It’s the return of humility.

Excessive hubris has always been one of the fatal flaws of leadership, and it’s been displayed in abundance by many a CEO out there, as they made wild and reckless bets that have come up snake eyes.

It’s as if all of these executives ignored the existing conventional wisdom of achieving sustained business greatness - the blend of will and humility Jim Collins refers to in his book  “Good to Great” as “Level 5 leadership” - in the misguided belief that they alone had all the answers, and that any show of restraint, or for that matter, expansion of the inner circles to thoughtfully and inclusively debate and discuss strategy and vision, and risk and reward, and the long term versus the short term, was nothing more than a waste of time.

The additional problem was that our business and financial culture had also developed an alarming tendency to “lionize” these high powered, ego driven, status-conscious and  materialistic leaders, treating them with (largely) unearned respect and blind trust.

Take Bernie Madoff, for example.   Frank Rich recently quoted one of his victims as saying “We gave him everything. We thought he was God“.    Easy money was to be found in the corridors of financial power. $10,000 wastebaskets?  Five-Star hotel junkets?  Who cares as long as I get my own double-digit returns relying on their “expertise”.

Now the denouement has come - and it has arrived with hurricane force.    Everyone has been humbled by the voracity of the downturn - that is, everyone except those who paid themselves billions of bonuses even though their companies were insolvent.    But even they are now taking a bite of humble pie, because the world has now fundamentally changed.

And changed for the good.    Some lessons are harder than others, and this one is a doozy, to be sure.   Humility means admitting we don’t have all the answers - heck, we probably don’t even know all the questions (like the ones about the propriety of credit default swaps, for example).

Great leaders know this - it’s in their DNA.   It’s being brave enough to have teammates that are not just “yes men” or venerators, and maybe are even smarter than they are.  It’s using “we” and casting aside “I”.   It’s about decency, fairness, and mindfulness.   It’s Container Store instead of Neiman Marcus.

It’s not all about you.

It takes humility to know that we are not masters of our universe.  There are so many things that are out of our control.  Every action can certainly have an equal and opposite reaction.   We are not gods. We are not infallible.

While I certainly wish that this badly needed societal sense of perspective could have been divined through less painful means, I look forward with a great sense of optimism, because I believe the companies that will survive and thrive in a post-downturn world will be led by a new generation of ‘Level 5s” -  relentlessly and humbly pursuing  renewed greatness and growth.

Welcome back, humility.   We really missed you.  Please make yourself at home and stay a long, long, long while.