In 1999 (not a typo), in a shockingly rare moment of forward thinking and risk taking, Sears’ senior leadership decided to launch an enterprise-wide initiative to glean how e-commerce and digital technology would alter our business model and to design a strategy to meet customer needs “anytime, anywhere, anyway.”

Millions of dollars were allocated, full and part-time resources were assigned from various business and support functions, a big name consulting firm was hired to help with systems integration, governance structures were created, and yours truly was plucked from the relative obscurity of running a small division to become the Vice President of Multi-channel Development & Integration.

Over a 15 month period, our renegade bunch of retail futurists executed a ton of analysis, unearthed scary findings (we had over 200 different 1-800 numbers!), delivered PowerPoint presentations bursting with jargon and coined memorable catch-phrases (my favorite: “silos belong on farms”). We also gained a deep appreciation for the barriers erected by organizations steeped in product and channel-centric thinking and behavior.

Once we wrapped up our work–and having blown through something like $7 million– we couldn’t point to many immediate high ROI recommendations. But our work did lead to an acceleration of investment in sears.com, building systems to create a single view of the customer and the formation of a central CRM group that yielded a lot of actionable customer insight.  We also developed the confidence to make pioneering investments in critical cross-channel capabilities such as ordering on-line and picking up in-store.

Personally I gained a very firm understanding of what is required to design a customer-centric strategy and implement a frictionless, channel-agnostic experience–which I was able to leverage once I moved on to the Neiman Marcus Group and in the years since I’ve been a consultant.

The purpose of this story, however, is not to regale you with my multi-channel bona fides.

The real point is that despite all the recent fervor around omni-channel this and omni-channel that, if you were really paying attention at any time during the past ten years or so, it has been blindingly obvious that digital technology was going to dramatically change the retail customer experience.

If you were really paying attention, you would know that Sears (and others) were publicly discussing the higher spend and engagement rates of multiple channels shoppers as early as 2003.

If you were really paying attention, you would know that companies like Nordstrom have been investing heavily in channel integration technology and processes for nearly a decade.

So if you are just starting to take customer-centricity seriously now–if you are peppering your earnings reports, industry conference presentations and investor meetings with little anecdotes about cross-channel customer behavior and the omni-channel blur as if this all just started happening–all this proves is that you were not paying enough attention years ago.  One has to wonder what other game-changing stuff you are years behind on.

Of course as Seth reminds us: “The best time to start was a while ago. The second best time to start is today.”

Leading through innovation starts first with awareness. Which needs to be followed with acceptance.

It’s a choice what you decide to pay attention to. And it’s a choice to act and to act boldly. Ultimately nothing matters without action.

It’s later than you think.

Does it bother you that Pottery Barn has no pottery for sale and that their stores look nothing like a barn?

In my experience, one of the most frustrating experiences one can have in business is to go through a naming exercise for a new product or service.

I worked on developing a new specialty store concept several years ago and during the search for its name, our CEO came into my office virtually every day to either throw out some idea he came up with the night before (“what if we call it ‘Cool Stuff’?”) or to get my reaction to some existing store name that baffled him (“what’s up with Banana Republic?”).

Of course the issue is that so often we become obsessed with the name, rather than focusing our attention on building a brand. A name without a relevant, differentiated and compelling set of experiences, delivered consistently, over time, risks becoming just a meaningless description.

Now, experts in branding will tell you that there are qualities that make for better names–things like being unique, memorable, easy to pronounce, evocative, supportive of your positioning and the like. And, I certainly recommend that you incorporate this advice into your naming process. By now it’s clear that BlackBerry was a better choice than sticking with the product’s original more literal name PocketLink.

So go spend some time on finding a “good” name. But spend far more time and effort on creating and executing a great brand.

And if you need some inspiration, go do a Google search on your Apple.

Before virtually everyone had access to high-speed internet anytime, anywhere, you could get away with silo-ed sales channels and disconnected customer experiences.

Before your customers had frequent exposure to best-in-class customer service, or easy to use on-line checkout or relevant personalization–or whatever counts for meaningfully useful these days–you could get away with parts of your value proposition being less than ideal.

But in a world where the power continues to shift from brands to consumers, where your customer doesn’t care how you happen to be organized, where she increasingly expects you to know her, remember her and tailor experiences to her precise wants and needs, the table stakes continue to rise.

Sure, you can probably get away with some of your short-comings for a bit longer.

But getting away with something hardly demonstrates leadership.

And failing to understand, and to act upon, the differences between “nice to have” and table stakes is a sure path to failure.

Now I was never a pitcher (well, except for one brief shining moment at the age of 11. Glory days, yeah they’ll pass you by…), but as more and more pitchers figured out how to throw an effective breaking ball the implication for me was clear. I needed to learn how to hit it.

This took concentration. This took practice. This took perseverance. And along the way there were plenty of embarrassing times when I went down swinging, completely fooled by a pitcher’s improving delivery.

In your business you’ve probably noticed how quickly the world changes, how your competition continually ups their game, how what once worked well for you no longer gets the job done.

Here too the implication seems clear.

When life throws you more curve balls, you must learn to become a curve ball hitter.

We might be self-conscious about the way we look or embarrassed by what we think is a paltry rep count. Perhaps we feel a bit ashamed as we compare ourselves to those who fly by us on the running trail or log countless minutes at a furious pace on the elliptical machine nearby.

When it comes to a personal fitness plan it’s a choice whether to start one at all and it’s a choice where and how we work out.

Alas in business neither of those are good choices any more.

It used to be your that marketing plans could be studied and honed before the big reveal of a new campaign. But opportunities to do that now are few and far between.

It used to be to that new ideas could be test marketed in carefully controlled environments that allowed for precise measurement and rigorous forecasting. But good luck making that your predominant mode of bringing new products to market today.

It used to be that a brand got to decide how fast information about their new product or service got disseminated to the world. Today that notion seems increasingly ridiculous.

The new reality is that, more and more, you have no choice but to work out many of your strategies and tactics in public before you feel totally ready. You have to be set up to test and learn, to rapidly evolve your plans and to dynamically respond to whatever the market throws at you.

And you have to accept that from time to time you may look foolish. You have to risk that your competitor is better at some things than you are and that the market might notice.

But just like your own personal fitness program some things are true. If you don’t start and persevere through the initial, most challenging phases you will never achieve a high level of performance.

And reps do matter.

More and more, mobile, and all things digital, blur the lines between e-commerce and brick-and-mortar.

More and more, your channel-centric thinking–and organization, metrics, incentives and budgeting–are becoming barriers to meeting the customer where she is.

More and more, your mission, if you choose to accept it, is embrace the world of channel hop and focus on delivering a frictionless customer experience.

Merge ahead.

Or risk being side-swiped.

I’m not talking about a literal jury–or even one of those goofy panels HLN puts together for sensational legal cases.

I’m talking about those sometimes nameless and faceless people that we consciously or unconsciously allow to drive our attitudes and behaviors.

We not only believe that there are these groups of people who are out there constantly judging us, but we take action to seek their approval, to get them to agree with us, to persuade them to buy whatever it is we are selling. To try to make them like us.

There are useful juries of course. Hopefully we all have friends, confidants or other members of our tribe whose input is trusted and valuable. They help us sharpen our message and fine-tune our product or service. They give us confidence to walk through our fear.

The customers we have or want are useful juries as well. Ultimately if they aren’t voting on behalf of our value proposition it matters a lot. And we have the choice to adjust our strategy and try to win them back, or move on to something new.

The useless jury, however, is the most pernicious.

Sometimes they take the form of the relentless defender of the status quo. They are filled with fear and hate most change, particularly if it might somehow reflect badly on them.

Sometimes they are the folks that aren’t engaged enough with your project to fully understand what it is about and who it is for–and you are powerless to change that. If they aren’t willing to do the work, they don’t get a vote.

Mostly, though, the juries that bring us down–that keep us stuck–are those whose judgment is irrelevant, yet somehow we feel compelled to listen.

When, as Seth reminds us, you choose your customer first then you can be emboldened to say and accept that “this is not for you.”  And if it’s not for them, why does their opinion matter, why do you have to listen, why let them hold you back?

It’s time to dismiss all the useless juries in your life.

Whether we’re talking about social media, mobile apps, big data analytics, cross-channel integration–or whatever the buzz-phrase of the moment happens to be–there is a tendency to glom on to how something works and whether whatever is being sold can deliver ROI as a stand-alone investment.

Yet the reality is that your journey toward impactful customer-centricity, toward being truly channel agnostic, and ultimately delivering on the promise of a frictionless customer experience, isn’t merely about picking the right individual component pieces that move you closer to your vision.

This is not to say that individual investment decisions aren’t important or that one should completely ignore ROI calculations.

But the remarkable brands of tomorrow are likely to be run by leaders who understand where they need to get to and are committed to work through the ways to get there. They realize that their brand is an eco-system and creating it requires ruthless experimentation, making some bold investments, driving a culture that puts the customer first and aligning the organization and metrics against that end vision.

In an ever-changing and fast-moving world the vehicles we choose are likely to come and go.  When we hold too tightly to them we  risk losing sight of the destination.

To paraphrase the African proverb: it doesn’t really matter whether we are the lion or the gazelle. All we know is that with the rising of the sun we feel we had better start running.

The ability to be connected anytime, anywhere drives many of us to obsessively check our in-box, go to social media sites dozens of times a day (what if we miss something!?!?) and keep our smart phone always at the ready just to be sure we stay abreast of any text messages.

Yet…

How often is our daily agenda controlled by things that we tell ourselves we are supposed to do versus truly need or want to do?

How much of our time is spent on things that seem urgent, but are hardly important?

Why do we feel we must constantly know what’s going on?  Is it because we see ourselves as super heroes who might be called into action at any moment to save the planet? What are we afraid of if we don’t get to that e-mail for a few hours?

How much are we driven by the warm blanket of busyness that keeps our mind full rather than allowing ourselves the space to be mindful, present and intentional?

And how often, at the end of the day, do we beat ourselves up for not having accomplished much at all?

If we are honest with ourselves, how much is just running to stand still?

Exhausting ourselves on purpose, ultimately seems devoid of purpose.

He did so with a product manufactured by a company called Keystone Firing Arms and marketed with the charming slogan “my first rifle.”

This heart-breaking news raises all sorts of questions, big and small. And my intention is not to weigh in on the gun control debate. Though it does occur to me that the framers of the Constitution might have wanted to specify that the members of that  ”well regulated militia” should have at least graduated from kindergarten.

This event also comes just days after more than 400 people were killed in the collapse of a Bangladesh factory that existed to make the world–or at least the United States–safe for cheap blouses and swimsuits.

Any mindful person–and hopefully that includes you–will not have much difficulty identifying companies that engage in strictly legal, but morally questionable, activities.

Some, like the entire world of spammers, are merely annoying. Others are complicit in deeply tragic results.

If you are anything like me and you hear about these horrific events, you have a momentary jolt of sadness, perhaps reflect on the craziness of the world, and then move on to the busyness of our day. We tell ourselves this is somebody else’s problem to solve.

But I have to wonder.

Shouldn’t we be more appalled? Shouldn’t we be angrier?

Aren’t we all, in some way, accountable?