I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent.

I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.

Think about how you will start and where you will go. Get the head with logic and the heart with visuals or stories. And think about your core customer and all the other stakeholders as well.

If you are a large company and you want to do something unique, you almost by definition have to tap onto the core business in some way. Otherwise you are going into a naked fight against startups, and that's just a tough place to be.

The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.

History teaches us that many breakthroughs were happy accidents. Whether that's penicillin coming from Fleming neglecting to clean his laboratory before going on vacation or the team at Odeon trying a little side project that allowed people to communicate in real time as long as their message was 140 characters or less (which ultimately of course became Twitter), the unintended is often the transformational.

Creating the new increasingly is more than 50 percent of a top leader's job.