In a more innocent time, Memorial Day meant something special. For my father, a World War II veteran, it was a time to honor the soldiers who lost their lives defending our country. It was a time to fly the flag and pause to reflect.

My father’s generation understood why they went to war. They never questioned it. They never doubted. They knew what America stood for and they did what they had to do, even if it killed them. Then they came home and worked their butts off raising their families.

On Memorial Day we still honor those who fought and died but now we are less certain. More conflicted and less united. More divided, more cynical and less patriotic. Today it’s about long weekends and kicking off the summer. Big box sales and parties. Baseball and barbeques.

My father passed away on Memorial Day in 1991. So on this weekend I think about him and salute the sacrifices he and his generation made for their country. His America was different than mine but it still holds the same promise. The brand is a little more tarnished and the answers are not as clear, but when you peel back the politics and turn down the volume that stokes the fear, the values are still the same. Justice. Equality. Compassion. Strength. Courage.

Here’s to you Dad. I will remember. I will stand up. I won’t forget.  

I admit it. I’m still into comic books. I’m nuts about Superman, Batman, Spiderman and lots of other justice seeking superheroes. For what seems like forever, I’ve been waiting for Clark Kent to put on the costume and fly on Smallville.  Kal El has one more chance to fulfill his Kryptonian destiny and become Superman tonight in the series finale.

Superheroes always talk about destiny. They understand that there are two kinds of people in the world. Some of us wait for things to happen and some of us make things happen. Some of us are followers and some are leaders. Some of us like certainty and others are comfortable taking risks.

I’m not so sure I believe in destiny. I don’t think I was destined to own a Denver PR firm. I don’t know that I was destined to move to Denver or be a musician or work for a baseball team or run my own business. Those are all decisions I made along the way that determined the course of my life. I think I just made those things happen, instead of waiting for things to happen to me.

We make decisions and take the path that feels right for us when we get to the fork in the road. Some of it is planned and some of it is just dumb luck. The trick is figuring out if you prefer to follow someone else or pave the way. Do you take the path that your parents or your boss lays out for you or do you try to find your own way?

As PR pros, we often talk to clients about their objectives. What do they want to accomplish? What do they want to say? What story do they want to tell? It’s surprising how often the answers are not clear. They don’t know, or maybe they have never even considered the questions. They are waiting for things to happen to them instead of making things happen for them.

You and your business and your staff and your team all deserve the opportunity to determine their own destiny. To decide what kind of brand they want to represent or leader they want to be. It is important to create a culture that allows everyone in the organization the freedom to grow and improve and change and blossom. A culture where everyone is free to fulfill their destiny.   

As Spiderman says, with great power comes great responsibility.  Like Superman, we must use that power wisely to lead the kind of life and leave the kind of legacy we choose to create.    

Anyone who has been to a bluegrass festival has probably heard this joke. The band asks “Do we have any Texans in the audience?” After a lot of hooting and hollering, the band says, “Welcome to the United States.” Which reminds me of a story.

When I was a young musician I got a call from a guitar player in Texas. He needed a rhythm guitarist and singer for a Texas Swing band he was putting together. He had a six-month tour booked in the Southwest. Six months of steady gigs is hard to pass up for any musician, so when my West Coast tour was done I loaded up the van and drove from Oregon to North Texas.

We quickly threw the band together and started doing gigs in Texas honkey tonks. Picture that scene from the Blues Brothers with the chicken wire in front of the stage to block the beer bottles hurled by the unruly crowd. Like in the movie, we decided that when the drunk with a gun asks you for a request, you say ‘Yes Sir,’ even if you don’t know the song. You may not sound just like Merle Haggard, but if you are good enough, eventually they will start paying attention.

Until the real gigs started, I slept in the van while the rest of the band crashed in the guitar player’s parent’s house, who seemed to subsist on bacon and Dr. Pepper. The closest bar was miles away. It was hot and humid. I learned that in Texas, Rednecks are role models and guys are named Joe Bob. It was big time culture shock for a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey. It got worse when our six-month contract was cancelled after the first month. I couldn’t wait for my chance to escape back to the cool blue North.

I think about that when I hear about the “culture wars” going on in America. Tempers flare over budgets. Southerners seem to glorify the Civil War. Arguments rage over immigration, abortion, education and unions. Our failure to understand another group’s culture makes it impossible to see the good in them. It’s hard to hear what someone is saying above all the shouting. We become exclusive instead of inclusive. It makes us narrow minded and dumb.

The truth is that when I look back on my time in Texas I remember that the band was actually good. I met some great musicians and some good people. They liked our music. I saw a world I never knew existed and explored thousands of miles of the American Southwest.   

As Denver PR pros, our job is help our clients understand that it is important to respect the people they want to communicate with. If you don’t try and understand another’s culture, how can you know if what you are saying to them is relevant? How can you grow your business if you are running in place? How can you lead when you don’t understand the people you ask to follow you? 

In life or in business, if we are too rigid to understand another point of view we can’t learn or evolve. We can just stay stuck, surrounded by people who are just like us.

You don’t have to sound exactly like Merle Haggard to be a good country singer. You just have to feel what Merle feels. If only culture shock led to a deeper understanding of other cultures instead of an urge to run away. Maybe we just need to temper our experience with some perspective.    

Then they won a championship and the team replaced its marketing department with a new group of slick talking suits. That’s when things changed. Instead of “partnership,” the slick talking suits began using words like “it’s just business” to explain that they went behind your back to a competitor and signed the competitor to a bigger deal without having the courtesy to let you know about it first.

The ethical approach would have been to call you and say, “We’ve been approached by one of your competitors, how do you feel about that?” Instead, they informed you after the fact in an email because they didn’t have the decency to discuss it with you face to face.

Now I am far from naïve. I’ve worked for professional sports teams. I know that the business of sports is not always ethical. But the lack of ethics demonstrated by the Vapids was so galling because the foundation of my client’s business is based on one simple value: integrity. It is the essence of their brand and the strength of their relationships. It may sound old fashioned, but things like your word and your handshake are still important to my client. They understand that empty promises are bad for business and that trust is as important as profits.

Slick sales talk may impress some people, but it takes substance and character to sustain a strong reputation. Once people look behind the curtain you better have something they can count on. Otherwise you are just a fake wizard in a nice suit, as worthless and phony as a ponzi scheme.    

Watching them play is the best example I know of something that is straight, honest and true.  It’s pure joy. You don’t need to wonder about their motive, or if they are trying to sell you a bill of goods you don’t really need.

I thought about this after a rather unpleasant experience with a high profile Denver plumbing company. This company prides itself on customer service and goes above and beyond what other companies might do in that area. They email you nice profiles about their “master plumbers” and they are courteous and professional when they show up.

The problems started when they began to put the pressure on (no pun intended) to convince me to do a very expensive repair I didn’t think we needed. They implied, if not threatened, that if we didn’t do this in the next few days we’d be swimming in sewage. Not a pretty picture. So sign here and pay up or else.  

As I said, this company wants to be perceived as a reputable business. But ethics are more than just courtesy and a nice website. You can’t just say you are ethical. You actually have to live it and believe it and deliver it. I understand the sales process, but you can’t turn a new customer into a loyal customer by literally scaring the crap out of them.

Turns out things have been just fine since I decided to get a few other opinions. It wasn’t quite as urgent as it sounded. So I will never call that company again or refer them to anyone else.

Business ethics are simple. It’s not complicated. There is a right way and a wrong way to treat people and you just need to decide which way you want to go. Then you need to base your business decisions on that ethical direction. Your reputation will follow.

My dogs are not confused about ethics. They know what is right and what they want. They know what is pure and they can smell a phony line of crap a mile away. We can all learn a valuable lesson from watching them play. We all have to choose what sort of reputation we want. As Dylan said, we need to know our song well before we start singing.   

As Paul Simon sang, one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. In other words, people look at things differently depending on their perspective.

That’s obvious in politics, where a positive term like investment becomes something negative to someone else. Or where an end of life conversation with your doctor becomes a death panel and educating people about a serious problem like childhood obesity becomes something sinister.

This failure to communicate also happens in relationships. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, right? The fact is, if you don’t trust someone you are going to be skeptical about their motives. Which brings me to my point.

A friend who works for another PR firm was telling me about a frustrating client that consistently challenged him. The client questioned everything my friend did, demanded constant changes and revisions, and made simple projects difficult because the client was certain that my friend didn’t know what he was doing and that the client could do it better. There are two things happening here that make this relationship complicated. One is that this is a typical example of a high maintenance client. Like in When Harry Met Sally, the worst kind of high maintenance client is one that doesn’t know it is high maintenance. The other thing happening here is a serious lack of trust.

The client hired you because of your expertise but now doubts your judgment. Is this an insecure client or are you not working hard enough to earn their trust? Are you not meeting the client’s expectations or are the client’s expectations not realistic? Perhaps it is a little of both, but is this a problem that can be solved? And are you willing to put in the effort to make it possible?

Effective communication takes patience and trust. Both sides need to be willing to see things from the other’s perspective. Both need to acknowledge that there is a problem and agree to work together to find a solution. Both need to be open to compromise.

Reasonable people can make reasonable decisions when there is a good reason. For my friend, the reason has to start with the fact that this is an important client that the firm wants to keep. For the client, it needs to start with remembering why it hired the PR firm in the first place, because it had the talent, experience and track record to help the client succeed.    

It may be that the firm and the client would be better off parting ways. Some things just are not meant to be. But if the relationship is important enough they will take the necessary steps to cross the bridge dividing them and meet each other half way.

Are you willing to look at things differently, or is the effort not worth the trouble? One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Or as Dylan said, I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours. 

As Leigh Rubin, the artist behind Rubes Cartoons expressed in a humorous cartoon revision of Newton’s Law,  “What goes up must come down, except for health insurance premiums.”

That essential law of gravity is very apparent during a crisis. Just ask the owners of the New York Mets, who are facing a $1 billion lawsuit that claims they illegally profited from Bernie Madoff’s investments just two years after New York celebrated them for opening the Mets new stadium, Citi Field.  Or as Hosni Mubarak might say, “don’t ask.” Anytime you are being burned in effigy you have a major problem on your hands.

To everything there is a season and you never know when the tide will turn. Crises come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. They can be serious and drawn out, like the BP oil spill. Or they can be less serious and shorter-term like a negative TV story. It can make you look bad but it usually doesn’t make you lose you shirt or your life.

The most important thing you can do to manage a crisis is to prepare for it ahead of time. That means having a plan in place that anticipates what could happen and how you would deal with it if it does. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t plan ahead. They wait until the investigative reporter ambushes them in the parking lot before they contact a PR firm to put out the fire. That may ultimately save the building but not your prized possessions.

It may not be possible to manage a crisis without damage to your reputation, but you can minimize the impact and the recovery process by planning ahead and taking the following steps:

Don’t wait until the hounds are at your door to call for reinforcements.  Plan ahead so when the ball comes down you’ll be ready to catch it. Like the Boy Scouts, always be prepared. You may not always escape injury but you will surely improve your odds of survival.