Put yourself in the position of a middle-class family of five, where both parents work in order to make the mortgage, pay the car loans, and perhaps take a week's worth of vacation each year.

Could you answer three simple questions for this middle-class family? I know I can't....

How as a country do we decide what we can afford? For decades we've been told that we "can't afford" to provide basic health insurance to tens of millions of people--including millions of children--who must somehow do with out it, even though they work at full-time jobs. And yet, over the course of a weekend, we're told that we "can't afford" not to provide a Wall Street bailout worth some $700 billion? If we can come up with money to rescue bankers, why can't we come up with money to provided minimal health care for kids? Funny what we can afford to do when we put our minds to it.

How as a country do we decide what's fair? For example, why is welfare reform good for the poor, but not for the rich? During the 1990s, the cry for welfare reform, embraced by everyone from New Gingrich to Bill Clinton, resulted in a wave of policies designed to break the dependence of poor people on public subsidies and to stop reinforcing destructive social behaviors.

Fair enough. But if welfare reform makes sense for poor people in Bridgeport, Connecticut, doesn't it make sense for rich people in Greenwich, Connecticut? Talk about a culture of dependency! First there was the S&L bailout. Now there is the mortgage mess. Let's call these bailouts what they are: corporate welfare. And if government is within its rights to impose conditions on poor people before they can collect payments for food and shelter, isn't government within its rights to impose conditions (such as limits on salaries and bonuses) on investment bankers who are turning worthless mortgage bonds into financial food stamps?

And now for the biggest question of all: Why do our leaders demand so little of themselves? Today's edition of The Independent, the London newspaper, reports that the New York office of Lehman Brothers set aside a bonus pool of $2.5 billion just a few days before the firm filed for bankruptcy. Not only has Barclays Bank, which is going to buy Lehman's New York office, agreed to pay out the funds, but it is negotiating with what it considers to be Lehman's top 30 executives for contracts worth tens of millions of dollars more.

Meanwhile, Jake Tapper of ABC News reported some startling figures on his blog. In 2007, Wall Street's five biggest firms paid out a record $39 billion worth of bonuses to themselves. (That's $10 billion more, Tapper noted, than the $29 billion the US government is lending JP Morgan to save Bear Stearns.) And by the way, he adds, those Big Five firms lost $74 billion in shareholder value in 2007--their worst year since 2002.

Business schools are teaching more courses than ever in ethics and values. Did the leaders on Wall Street skip those classes? Isn't anyone going to offer to work for free to clean up the mess they helped to create? Won't someone repatriate a fraction of the bonus money they earned from bad deals that taxpayers now have to absorb? Is this what leadership has come to? Enjoy the ride on the way up, pass the buck on the way down?

Anyone with thoughts about these questions is urged to provide them in the comments section. I for one am out of answers.

Where, I ask my fellow Harvard Business Online bloggers and readers, is our collective outrage? Where is our righteous indignation? Where is the demand for heads to roll and penalties to be paid?

I'm all for reckoning with the policy implications of what's unfolding, and for advising individual businesspeople on how to stay sane in wacky times--I've given some of that advice myself. But today, in the middle of the financial hurricane, there's something much more simple knocking me around: When will the leaders who keep creating these messes really pay the price? Financially, sure, but also in terms of public humiliation and cultural revulsion at what they've done and what they stand for.

Business executives, especially well-paid business executives, love to denounce government as corrupt, unproductive, and slow to react to big problems. Memo to all you government-bashing "geniuses" on Wall Street: Have you looked in the mirror? And not just over the last few months.

The mortgage disaster, after all, is merely the most recent in a series of sickeningly predictable disasters born of individual greed and collective stupidity by some of the best-educated, most highly paid, most publicly respected, and most privately arrogant, business leaders on the planet.

Wall Street has just won the Triple Crown of Folly. During the late 1980s, there was the LBO boom and junk-bond explosion, which ended in a financial meltdown and a best-selling book called, appropriately, Den of Thieves. The 1990s brought the first dotcom boom and bust, the Wall Street research scandals, and the unappetizing sight of respected investment-banking analysts urging their clients to buy stock in companies that they were disparaging to their colleagues. And now, as we enter the first decade of the 21st century, we get the mortgage crisis and the credit crunch.

Thanks, Wall Street, it's been a helluva run!

Yet still, almost inexplicably, Wall Street maintains its hold on the cultural imagination. The brightest students at the best business schools clamor to work in hedge funds, private equity firms, and investments banks--the institutions that keep creating these financial disasters. Both political parties take huge contributions from investment bankers, and treat them as all-knowing economic sages. Washington (which means us) keeps worrying about their solvency, propping them up, and vowing to maintain Wall Street's status as the world's financial capital.

I'd love to go inside Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and all the big-name financial institutions making front-page news, and get the names of every senior executive who has had a hand in all three of these disasters over the last twenty years. You know as well as I do that the list would be long. I'm not sure if the orientation kit at Wall Street firms includes an extra-large can of Teflon, but very little of the mess that investment bankers and money managers make ever seems to stick to them.

It's time for that to change. I don't know how, exactly, other than to say out loud what needs to be said: Wall Street is a Ship of Fools, and I, for one, am sick and tired of bailing it out.

For more from Bill Taylor, see Is Bank of America's Ken Lewis Brave or Crazy?

For more on the financial industry crisis, see the Complete Downturn Survival Guide

Failure, we like to tell ourselves, is a powerful opportunity to learn. If that's the case, there must be lots of executives learning powerful lessons these days. The government has stepped in to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, once pillars of the financial system, whose misguided policies enabled so much of the mortgage madnesss. The CEO of Washington Mutual, once a darling of Wall Street analysts, resigned in the face of balance-sheet pressures. Banks and financial institutions everywhere are writing down assets, bumping up loss reserves, slashing payrolls--and watching shareholder value evaporate.

What can we learn from this heartache and misery? To me, the most valuable insights come from those few leaders who refused to be seduced by the promises of fast growth and easy profits. Sure, many of the biggest and best-known names in banking decided to offer teaser rates to attract unqualified borrowers, and to approve loans without verifying incomes. But a few holdouts, who were tremendously creative in much of how they did business, decided that when it came to the "financial engineering" that reshaped the mortgage market, Huey Lewis had it right: It's hip to be square.

One case in point is Hudson City Bancorp, a 140-year-old company based in Paramus, New Jersey that has managed to avoid the mortgage meltdown and continues to post tremendous results. Business journalists have discovered this quiet little outfit and marveled at its strategic insights. Its shares are up 50 percent since last August, when the credit crisis really kicked in. (A leading index of bank stocks is down 40 percent over the same period.) "Hudson City banks the old-fashioned way," Newsweek marveled. "It takes deposits and makes mortgages to people who buy homes in which they plan to live. And then it hangs on to" the mortgages, rather than sell them in the secondary market.

Imagine the brilliance! Take deposits. Make sensible loans. Repeat over and over again, until your market cap approaches $10 billion.

The New York Times tried to unpack the secrets of Hudson's success and offered this analysis: "The bank carefully screened loan applicants to ensure they would be able both to afford a new house and reside there, rather than flip it. And the bank demanded hefty down payments...as a cushion against any sharp drop in home prices, because it planned to hang on to the loans."

What a formula! Make sure borrowers can afford their loans. Insist that they make a big down payment. Favor owners over speculators.

Hudson City's mindful approach to banking only looks remarkable because so many established banks lost their minds. ING Direct, a cutting-edge banking innovator about which I've written in the past, also managed to avoid the march of folly in its industry. The bank avoided the subprime meltdown because it stuck to simple, plain-vanilla mortgages rather than exotic instruments that sounded too good to be true (and were). The bank has written 100,000 mortgages worth $26 billion and has a grand total of 15 foreclosures. Not 15 percent, just 15 mortgages out of 100,000.

Arkadi Kuhlmann, ING Direct's founder and CEO, is one of the most creative business leaders I've ever met. But he was able to distinguish between get-rich-quick industry fads and real innovation. "Every person who tries to do real innovation is going to be tempted by money, greed, acceptance, being in the middle of the action," Kuhlmann says. "But at the core there is one fundamental difference: I know why I'm here. I want to make a difference. If I was into this just for making money, being a big accepted banker, I would have been tempted. But that's not why I'm here. I am trying to build something that changes the business, that allows me to stay on the right side of the discussion."

Kuhlmann's skepticism about mortgage fads speaks to one of the unappreciated elements of strategy and creativity. Sometimes, the most important form of leadership is resisting an innovation that takes hold in your field when that innovation, no matter how popular with your rivals, is at odds with your long-term point of view. The most determined innovators are as conservative as they are unique. They make big strategic bets for the long term and don't hedge their bets when strategic fashions change.

"We as individual leaders operate inside a cultural context," Kuhlmann explains. "The question is, do you want to try to influence the culture that you're in, or do you want the culture that you're in to overwhelm you?"

By combining cutting-edge insights with back-to-basics discipline, ING Direct, like Hudson City Bancorp, has created a powerful new force in the financial-services market. Kuhlmann and his colleagues resisted the worst excesses of the last few years, because they weren't interested in running with the pack--they were determined to do what made sense to them. "When you run with the pack, what you generally see are other people's backsides," Kuhlmann wisecracks. "We know why we're here, and it's not to photocopy other people's bad ideas."

Do you have the values and discipline to keep your head when so many around you are losing theirs?

For more from Bill Taylor, see Is Bank of America's Ken Lewis Brave or Crazy?

For more on the financial industry crisis, see the Complete Downturn Survival Guide

1. Never violate the trust of my clients or disrespect their property.
2. Never say, "I don't know." Instead, say, "I'll find out."
3. Always understand that my clients' time is more valuable than my own.
4. Assume every problem is my fault, unless proven otherwise.
5. Consider my job done only when my client is completely overwhelmed with joy. And instead of assuming they're happy, I'll ask them.
6. Keep every promise I make. Including this one.

And yet...amidst all these dark clouds ands ominous forecasts, there are patches of bright sun and clear skies. Honda just reported profits of $1.7 billion for the quarter ended June 30--a record quarterly performance for a company that's posted lots of great quarters. Southwest Airlines reported yet another profitable quarter--a 15% increase over a year ago, and its 69th consecutive quarter of profitability. And Netflix, the online-movie pioneer whose fortunes skeptics love to question, delivered better-than-expected results and increased its subscriber base to an eye-opening 8.4 million households.

How is it that Honda, Southwest, and Netflix manage to thrive, when so many of their peers not only struggle to break even but flirt with outright disaster? The answers don't just speak to these three competitors, but to the new logic of competition itself.

First, high-performing companies understand that it's not enough to be "pretty good" at everything anymore. As a company, you have to be the most of something--the most exclusive, the most affordable, the most responsive, the most friendly. Companies used to want to be in the middle of the road--that's where all the customers were. But now, in an age of hyper-competition and non-stop innovation, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What do they say in Texas? "The only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos." To which we might now add: "And once-great companies that are slowly going out of business."

There's no doubt that Honda, Southwest, and Netflix have always understood what they are the most of. Honda is legendary for its focus on the performance of its engines and its commitment to grow from the low end of the automobile market up the value chain. Southwest has always managed to combine low fares with great service--anything else is a distraction. And Netflix understands that it doesn't just offer customers the widest variety of movies to watch, but that it helps customer make smarter choices about the movies they watch.

Second, high-performance companies understand that in an era of great turmoil, the best strategy is to stick with what you believe in. Business thinkers love to excoriate big companies and their leaders because they don't have the guts to change. In fact, the problem with many big companies is that all they do is change. They lurch from one consulting firm to the next, from one management fad to another, from one target customer base to a different set of customers. Detroit's Big Three seem to change business strategies with every model year! They diversified into other industries, then refocused on cars, they pushed high-margin SUVs and pickups, now they are scrambling to make more small cars.

Amazingly, even in a business environment filled with dramatic change, Honda, Southwest, and Netflix stick to their guns. Sure, they tweak things at the margins: Southwest has fine-tuned its boarding procedures to appeal to business travelers, Netflix is experimenting with digital downloads as opposed to movies-by-mail. But they have made big strategic bets for the long term--and they don't hedge their bets based on the price of fuel or the latest developments in Silicon Valley.

Legendary management guru Jim Collins puts it best: "The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency."

There's a third element that helps to explain extraordinary performance in these extraordinarily difficult times. Each of these companies connects with its customers based not just on price and features, but on identity and emotion. They have become virtually irreplaceable in the eyes of their customers.

The researchers at Gallup have identified an escalating hierarchy of connections between companies and their customers--from confidence to integrity to pride to passion. To test for passion, Gallup asks customers a simple question: "Can you imagine a world without this product or brand?"

It's a lofty goal, but great companies (like Honda, Southwest, and Netflix) get there. Ask yourself, honestly: Can your customers live without you? Because if they can, they probably will.

RECOMMENDED READING
Mapping Your Competitive Position
Blue Ocean Strategy
How to Control the Middle of the Market

Want proof? Spend time with Paul Graham, who’s spent the last three years helping young entrepreneurs launch the companies of their dreams. Graham and his cofounders run a cool outfit called Y Combinator, with operations in two hotbeds of entrepreneurship: Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Graham and his colleagues provide both seed funding and hands-on advice to startups. Y Combinator invests a little money (rarely more than $20,000) and takes a small equity stake (an average of 6 percent or so.) And it funds its companies in “batches.” Every summer, entrepreneurs from around the world apply for the chance to spend three months in Cambridge. Graham and his colleagues help people refine their ideas, critique their prototypes, and teach them how to present to venture capitalists and angels—all of which leads to a “Demo Day” for potential investors. Every winter, the same immersion experience takes place in Mountain View, California. There are two Demo Days in the Valley, given the sheer number of eager venture capitalists.

This summer, Graham’s got 60 founders, representing 22 companies, at work on their ideas. All told, Y Combinator has invested in 102 startups—including a bunch that have attracted lots of money and attention (Loopt, for example) or been acquired by big-time players (Reddit, for example). In other words, Graham has seen it all when it comes to startups (including starting and selling a company of his own back in the first Internet boom.)

So how would Paul Graham advise young entrepreneurs who want to be “practically radical” in their approach to startups? He offers a few simple (and proven) principles that determine which startups work and which fail:

First, he says, “make something people want.” It sounds obvious, but young entrepreneurs often fall in love with what technology can do as opposed to what customers need. One of the questions on the application to Y Combinator makes the point well: “What are people forced to do now because what you plan to do doesn’t exist yet?”

Second, entrepreneurs have to “be willing to let their ideas change.” This sounds strange: Aren’t great startups built around a great idea? Yes, but a great idea isn’t always the original idea. Countless times during the Y Combinator experience, startups have made dramatic changes not just in strategies and tactics, but in the very essence of what they do. Amazingly, Graham told me, the founders of Reddit came to Y Combinator with a plan to help people order fast food on their cell phones. When everyone agreed it wasn't exactly a killer idea, the desperate search for a new idea led to the launch of their successful company.

Third, and this also sounds strange, Graham tells startups: “Don’t worry too much about money.” That’s what’s really different about this second wave of Web-enabled startups: It’s become so cheap to buy equipment, reach customers, and generate buzz on the Web, that the power of investors and venture capitalists is on the wane. “It’s so much easier to get the money you need than to make something great,” he says. Or, as Graham points out, today, unlike back in the mid-90s, you’ve got the MBAs working for the technologists, rather than the other way around.

Finally, Graham urges his company founders to always “be benevolent” in terms of how they do business—to act in the long-term best interests of customers, as opposed to the short-term best interests of themselves. In other words, the most important rule for starting a company is the Golden Rule—or, in the uopdated version in Google’s strategic bible, “Don’t be evil.”

Why is benevolence powerful? First, it keeps morale and energy high. In an age of constant disruption and realignment, employees want to be the “good guys” in their field—so it makes sense for companies to act that way.

Second, more than ever, successful companies require the active participation of customers, suppliers, and industry enthusiasts. “If you’re benevolent,” Graham says, “people will rally around you” with ideas, improvements, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Finally, benevolence helps founders to be more decisive. If you make every decision based on “doing whatever is best for your users,” it’s that much easier to make decisions.

The most important decision, of course, is starting a company in the first place. And once you do, be sure to use these two resources: Paul’s must-see talk to a gathering of entrepreneurs at Stanford called Startup School, and his must read-essay “How to Start a Startup.”

Here’s hoping you decide to get started—and that you succeed.

More than anything, though, Wall-E has generated amazement from Hollywood observers at Pixar’s capacity to generate hit after hit in the fickle world of big-budget filmmaking. Wall-E is the studio’s ninth consecutive number-one movie since the release of Toy Story in 1995, an unparalleled record of creative and commercial success.

There are all kinds of theories about the secrets of Pixar’s success. But I’m convinced that Pixar’s films work so well with audiences because Pixar works so distinctively as a company. My colleague Polly LaBarre and I wrote about Pixar in our book, Mavericks at Work, and its latest box-office hit gives me a chance to reprise one of our “greatest-hit” messages from the book: You can’t win big unless you change the game in your field.

Pixar doesn't just make films that perform better than standard fare. It also makes its films differently — and, in the process, defies many familiar, and dysfunctional, industry conventions. Pixar has become the envy of Hollywood because it never went Hollywood.

More than a few business pundits have drawn parallels between the flat, decentralized "corporation of the future" and the ad-hoc collection of actors, producers and technicians that come together around a film and disband once it is finished. In the Hollywood model, highly talented people agree to terms, do their jobs, and move on to the next project. The model allows for maximum flexibility, to be sure, but it inspires minimum loyalty and endless jockeying for advantage.

Turn that model on its head and you get the Pixar version: a tightknit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another, and strive to improve with every production. Andrew Stanton, who directed Wall-E, was a key figure behind Finding Nemo, which won two Oscars, generated worldwide box-office of $840 million, and became the best-selling DVD of all time. But Stanton didn’t follow the success of Nemo by offering himself to the highest bidder or demanding perks and special treatment. He went back to his job as an employee of the studio, to pitch in on other films and eventually begin work on his next major project.

And Stanton is merely one of many superbly talented writers and directors who have staked their reputations on their work at Pixar. Again, in contrast to convention, these professionals have traded one-time contracts for long-term affiliation and contribute across the studio, rather than to just their pet projects.

According to Randy Nelson, who joined the company in 1997 and is dean of Pixar University, this model reflects "Pixar's specific critique of the industry's standard practice." He explains it this way: "Contracts allow you to be irresponsible as a company. You don't need to worry about keeping people happy and fulfilled. What we have created here — an incredible workspace, opportunities to learn and grow, and, most of all, great co-workers — is better than any contract."

Pixar University is at the center of Pixar’s workplace agenda. The operation has more than 110 courses: a complete filmmaking curriculum, classes on painting, drawing, sculpting and creative writing. "We offer the equivalent of an undergraduate education in fine arts and the art of filmmaking," Nelson said. Every employee — whether an animator, technician, production assistant, accountant, marketer, or security guard — is encouraged to devote up to four hours a week, every week, to his or her education.

Randy Nelson is adamant: these classes are not just a break from the office routine. "This is part of everyone's work," he said. "We're all filmmakers here. We all have access to the same curriculum. In class, people from every level sit right next to our directors and the president of the company."

During our research for Mavericks, Polly sat in on a class at Pixar University. The students represented an intriguing cross-section of employees: a post-production software engineer, a set dresser, a marketer, even a company chef, Luigi Passalacqua. "I speak the language of food," he said. "Now I'm learning to speak the language of film."

Thanks to Pixar University, employees learn to see the company's work (and their colleagues) in a new light. "The skills we develop are skills we need everywhere in the organization," Nelson said. "Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn't just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant. There's no company on earth that wouldn't benefit from having people become more observant."

That helps to explain why the Pixar University crest bears the Latin inscription, Alienus Non Diutius. Translation: alone no longer. "It's the heart of our model," Randy Nelson says, "giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together."

That’s not how most of Hollywood does it—which helps to explain why Pixar does so well. How are you changing the game in your field? What is your distinctive take on how your industry operates? Do you work as distinctively as you compete?

Generate compelling answers to these make-or-break questions, and you just might create some hits of your own.

But George Carlin made another contribution to the language—believe it or not, to the language of business and innovation. The term he coined was "vuja dé"—and it's become a battle cry of sorts for innovators who aspire to make big change by identifying opportunities that others don't see.

We all know déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve been there before. But what's valuable to innovation is vuja dé—looking at a familiar situation with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before, and with those fresh eyes developing a new line of sight into the future.

Let's face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing, they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It’s the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn't see?

Answering that question requires vuja dé. And vuja dé requires a radical shift in perspective—which is why outsiders often see the future first. It’s also one of the big limitations of benchmarking. The most creative CEOs I’ve met don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their industry—especially when the best in class aren’t all that great. They aspire to learn from companies far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.

I first heard the term from Tom Kelley of IDEO, in his book The Ten Faces of Innovation. Tom reports that he heard the term from Stanford Professor Bob Sutton, who explores it in his book, Weird Ideas that Work. And Bob reports that George Carlin was the original inventor. This blog post from Tom gives a pretty good history of the term.

And now you've heard it from me! (Actually, in psychological circles, the more formal term is jamais vu, defined as "a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing a situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before.")

So the next time you feel stuck, like you're cycling through the same tired thinking about the same old problems, figure out a way to look at things fresh—to apply the virtues of vuja dé. It just might unleash a new approach to innovation—and prevent you, in your frustration, from using one of the seven words you can can never say on TV!

Thanks for the laughs, George, and thanks for helping us see the world with fresh eyes.

It’s always fun to try to apply lessons from sports to the world of business—even though usually, as I’ve written in a previous post, the lessons are pretty limited. In this case, though, the re-emergence of the NBA’s most storied franchise can teach important lessons about leadership and teamwork—and teach us why, even as so much of the competitive environment changes all around us, the rules of success remain largely the same.

Indeed, what struck me most about Game 6 was how the success of the 2007-2008 Celtics blended leadership wisdom from the past with a cultural sensibility rooted in the present. Or, to put it more simply, how the unlikely combination of Red Auerbach and Archbishop Desmond Tutu inspired the team on its championship run.

The influence of Red Auerbach is obvious. I was choked up and literally choking towards the end of Game 6, as fans around me lit up cigars in tribute to the legendary coach, general manager, and president of the Boston Celtics—the man most responsible for those first 16 championship banners.

The best way to understand the genius of Red Auerbach, and to appreciate how relevant his ideas were to the current Celtics, is to re-read an interview he did with HBR back in 1987, shortly after the Celtics won their 16th title. My friend and Fast Company co-founder Alan Webber conducted the interview, and it is filled with insights about how to create teamwork in an organization, how to evaluate performance in ways that go beyond statistics, and how one bozo at the top (in this case, John Y. Brown, who co-owned the Celtics briefly) could jeopardize in a year what it had took decades to build.

“How do you motivate the players?” Alan asked, expecting, I imagine, a complicated, multi-faceted answer. “Pride, that’s all,” Red answered. “Pride of excellence. Pride of winning. I tell our guys, ‘Isn’t it nice to go around all summer and say that you’re a member of the greatest basketball team in the world.’”

No wonder so many fans at Game 6 wore T-shirts emblazoned with messages about “Celtics pride”—a mystique that Red Auerbach invented, and this team finally restored, not because they won this game, but because of how they played all year.

But there was a second legendary leader whose values hovered over the court during Game 6. At the beginning of the season, searching for a way to inspire three great players to sacrifice on behalf of team goals, coach “Doc” Rivers read a collection of speeches by South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At the center of the speeches was the concept of “ubuntu”—a term from the Bantu languages of southern Africa that’s hard to translate into English but boils down to a simple but rich idea: “I am because of you.”

As Tutu explained, “A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished…”

The players took to the idea with real passion—they wore “ubuntu” on their wristbands, they chanted “ubuntu” as they broke the huddle, and, most important, they played selflessly, as if infused by the philosophy about which Archbishop Tutu spoke so eloquently.

Call it pride. Call it something more exotic. But it’s still what separates mediocre organizations from champions. And it’s why, the morning after Game 6, I ordered a different kind of T-shirt. It’s green, of course, featuring the Celtics shamrock, but it has only one word on it: Ubuntu.

Second, he is the kind of entrepreneur who insists on walking his talk—no matter how controversial the actions may be. Dave's entire philosophy of business is about the virtues of transparency and the power of interaction. So, as I have written in a previous GameChanger post, he and his colleagues have opened up the inner workings of BzzAgent, turning their corporate blog into a warts-and-all look at how BzzAgent really operates.

Well, in the spirit of walking the talk, Dave has done it again—and all of you get to benefit from his commitment to innovation! Like many idea-driven entrepreneurs, Dave decided to publish a book, in this case, a short, insatiably useful guide to the state-of-the-art in his field. The book is called The Word of Mouth Manual Volume II, and if you have any curiosity about how to get customers to start talking about your products and services, you simply must get a copy.

And that's where the innovation comes in! Dave has persuaded a collection of bloggers who believe in what he is doing to write about the book and suggest that their readers check it out. We're all doing it on the same day—today—and of course we're free to say whatever we'd like. In return for our being part of this experiment, our readers—that's you!—get to download Dave's book for free.

That's right: This book, which I guarantee will be of tremendous value as you think about the best way to raise the visibility of whatever you're doing, is available to you at no cost. You can download it here. Of course, if you're a traditionalist, you can also buy it from Amazon.com here.

I hope Dave's publishing experiment works for him (and you) because it demonstrates some game-changing approaches to the new world of marketing. It starts, of course, with a terrific product—something worth talking about. It then leverages a strategy to get people talking—in this case offering a valuable book at no cost. And finally, that strategy relies on allies and enthusiasts to help carry the message—people who are prepared to talk about what Dave and his colleagues are doing because they believe that they are advancing a cause, not just peddling a product.

My advice? Download the book, talk about it inside your company, and ask how you can apply its ideas to get other people talking about your products.

Not if you’re one of the programming wizards at 37Signals, a fast-growing company that is winning converts in the marketplace based on its commitment to “one-down” the competition and “under-do” its rivals. Talk about a strategic mind-flip: In a competitive environment defined by bloated products, hyped-up marketing, and financial excess, the way to succeed more is to do less.

There’s no question that 37Signals is succeeding. The company doesn’t just have customers, it has raving fans, and its leaders are certified Web celebrities. Its offerings, such as its Basecamp project-management software and its Highrise contact-management software, are refreshing models of simplicity in an industry ruled (and haunted) by complexity.

During a recent visit to Chicago, I visited 37Signals and spent some time with founder Jason Fried and his colleague David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the much-celebrated Ruby on Rails programming framework. (Twitter and many other Web 2.0 services are built on Ruby on Rails.) As it turns out, Jason, David and their colleagues don’t just have a simpler-is-better philosophy for writing software—they have a philosophy for building a business, and it’s every bit as well-defined as their code.

“When you’re competing against companies that have so much more, the only answer is to do less,” Jason and David told me. “Do less than your competitors to beat them. Instead of one-upping other companies, one-down them. Instead of out-doing other products, under-do them.”

I get it, I responded: Less is more, right? Jason and David shook their heads. “No, less is less—because more is not better! Everyone tries to do too much: solve too many problems, build products with too many features. Our goal is to do less, to build half a product rather than a half-assed product. So we say ‘no’ to almost everything. If you include every decent idea that comes along, you'll just wind up with a half-assed version of your product. What you really want to do is build half a product that kicks ass.”

That’s why, as products strategists, Jason and David focus on customers with smaller budgets, less bureaucracy, and fewer headaches. Most technology companies are obsessed with the “enterprise” market—Fortune 500 giants with complicated problems and big budgets. 37Signals builds software for entrepreneurs and small companies where the executives who buy the product also use the product—a market that they call the Fortune 5,000,000: “We solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else,” the company likes to say.

It’s a provocative challenge to a business culture addicted to more—whether that’s features of finances. “Revenue growth in and of itself is not a goal,” Jason and David insist. “We are about profits—profits per employee. And growth forever is not sustainable. There is a right size for certain things, at least if you want to do them well.”

That’s why, as entrepreneurs, Jason and David push themselves to spend less money and hire fewer colleagues. They also insist on working fewer hours. The company recently adopted an official four-day workweek, the better to keep everyone fresh, energized, and forced to avoid distractions.

“Don't hire people,” they implore in Getting Real, their Web-based book that is chock-a-block with great advice. “Look for another way. Is the work that's burdening you really necessary? What if you just don't do it? Can you solve the problem with a slice of software or a change of practice instead?”

Products that offer fewer features. Fewer employees who work fewer hours. Leaders who reject growth for growth’s sake. It’s the formula for success at 37Signals—and food for thought for the rest of us. Are you ready to succeed by one-downing the competition and under-doing your rivals?

If you’re the new boss, how do you make sure that you don’t repeat the bad habits of the old bosses who drove you crazy? My advice is to develop solid answers to five make-or-break questions for aspiring leaders.

1. Why should great people want to work with you? The best leaders understand that the most talented performers aren’t motivated primarily by money or status. Great people want to work on exciting projects. Great people want to feel like impact players. Put simply, great people want to feel like they’re part of something greater than themselves.

Early on in their company’s history, Google’s founders made clear that they considered the talent issue a make-or-break strategic issue for the future. So they published a Top Ten list of why the world’s best researchers, software programmers, and marketers should work at the Googleplex—and never once did they mention stock options or bonuses. Reason #2: “Life is beautiful. Being part of something that matters and working on products in which you can believe is remarkably fulfilling.” Reason #9: “Boldly go where no one has gone before. There are hundreds of challenges yet to solve. Your creative ideas matter here and are worth exploring.”

What’s your version of Google’s Top Ten list? Have you set out the most compelling reasons for great people to work on your team, in your division, at your company?

2. Do you know a great person when you see one? It’s a lot easier to be the right kind of leader if you’re running a team or department filled with the right kind of people. Indeed, as I reflect on the best workplaces I’ve visited, I’ve come to appreciate how much time and energy leaders spend on who gets to be there. These workplaces may feel different, but the organizing principle is the same: When it comes to evaluating talent, character counts for as much as credentials. Do you know what makes your star performers tick—and how to find more performers who share those attributes?

3. Can you find great people who aren’t looking for you? It’s a common-sense insight that’s commonly forgotten: The most talented performers tend to be in jobs they like, working with people they enjoy, on projects that keep them challenged. So leaders who are content to fill their organizations with people actively looking for jobs risk attracting malcontents and mediocre performers. The trick is to win over so-called “passive” jobseekers. These people may be outside your company, or they may be in a different department from inside your company, but they won’t work for you unless you work hard to persuade them to join.

4. Are you great at teaching great people how your team or company works and wins? Even the most highly focused specialists (software programmers, graphic designers, marketing wizards) are at their best when they appreciate how the whole business operates. That’s partly a matter of sharing financial statements: Can every person learn how to think like a businessperson? But it’s mainly a matter of shared understanding: Can smart people work on making everyone else in the organization smarter about the business?

5. Are you as tough on yourself as you are on your people? There’s no question that talented and ambitious young people have high expectations—for themselves, for their team or company, for their colleagues. Which is why they can be so tough on their leaders.

The ultimate challenge for a new boss who is determined not to be the same as the old boss is to demonstrate those same lofty expectations—for their behavior as leaders. One of my favorite HR gurus, Professor John Sullivan of San Francisco State University, says it best: “Stars don’t work for idiots.”

So here’s hoping that your team or department is filled with stars—and that they never think of you as an idiot.