With our two oldest children at college age, Tami and I decided this Spring to put our house on the market and explore downsizing into a home that more neatly fits a family of 5.

Our house has a distinctive story, even in an upscale market like Greenwich. We did a gut renovation of the home in 2005 — such a gut renovation that the home is really a 2005 replica of an 1840′s farmhouse that was expanded into a family mansion in 1900.

Unlike most of the recent new homes in Greenwich, we didn’t do a tear-down and build-back. When we designed the renovation, we wanted to keep the original proportions of the rooms, which were uncharacteristically large and distinguished. We also wanted to respect the way that the house was situated on the property; it had once been the main house for a 250+ acre working farm, and the way that the house looks out to the west is really special.

The interest has prompted a number of different news stories. The most fun for Tami and I was a short feature that ran this weekend on the LX.TV show Open House.

Here it is:

We’re at the cusp of an amazing cultural shift: the majority of women under 40 within 10 years will be better educated and better paid than men of equal age.

That means that the role of women‘s advocacy organizations in business is not only to strive for equality; it’s to help women prepare for the burdens of leadership.

Stark, but true.

Two recent data points help to support this assertion. The first is the disproportionate number of advanced degrees that women are earning in relation to men. Mark Perry of Carpe Diem shared a chart recently that shows that 139 women in the 25-29 year old group hold an advanced degree for every 100 men in that age group.

Perry also dug into the numbers related to equal pay and found that younger women are earning nearly on parity with men of the same age.

But for single workers who have never been married, the BLS reports that women made 94.2 percent as much money as their male counterparts in 2008. Equal Pay Day would fall on January 22 for these single females, almost three months earlier than the official, unadjusted Equal Pay Day of April 20 for all women. For a separate BLS category of single workers, those with “no children under 18 years old and whose marital status includes never married, divorced, separated and widowed,” women earned 95.6 percent as much as their male counterparts in 2008. Equal Pay Day for that group of single female workers would fall even earlier, on January 19, only a few weeks into the year.

The purpose of these data points isn’t to devalue the generations-long work to give women equal opportunity. It’s to acknowledge that it’s an appropriate time for the focus to shift.

I was struck by this recently when I found myself at a cocktail party hosted by The White House Project the evening before its Epic Awards Gala in New York.

The room was filled with a diverse group of notable and remarkable women, not the least of whom was Marie Wilson, one of the founders of The White House Project. The purpose of the organization is to prepare and present women for positions of leadership; Wilson believes that if women can fill one-third of the leadership positions in government and business, then the national dialogue would shift dramatically…and for the better.

I was at the cocktail party because of my relationship with a notable woman; my wife Tami recently joined to the corporate council of The White House Project. The video below from the Epic Awards gives you a brief feel for what TWHP does.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR6IVvDOsAM

As the cocktail party wound down, I spent a little time talking with a very passionate and engaging woman from Texas who is spearheading recognition of the anniversary of the 19th Amendment. She is an executive with a large technology company and spoke about how, just as she is entering the prime of her career, she’s confronted with the decision of whether or not to continue to commit time and energy to an organization that can’t advance women.

I probed around that point: What is it that keeps your company from becoming an attractive place to build a career?

“They don’t know what to do with us,” she said.

Her comment wasn’t colored with bravado, resentment or frustration. She was as puzzled by the organization’s inability to know what to do with a talented, ambitious woman as she believes the organization is puzzled by her.

Over my career, I’ve worked with very successful and effective women, many of whom have had positions of significant responsibility. I’ve witnessed their struggle for recognition and equality. Sometimes I’ve helped and sometimes I’ve hindered. What I have learned over the years is that the greatest reward that an organization can give women is the feeling of flexibility without punishment. I’ve also witnessed how challenging the embedded culture of organizations can be.

As I listened to Marie Wilson talk about The White House Project, I had a new sense of the power that women’s advocacy in business could have, and the benefit of organized and thoughtful dialogue around the questions of women in leadership.

The question is whether business will respond and engage in this dialogue with authenticity and integrity.

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I’m back from my week in the Bahama’s, which was relaxing and busy all at once. I posted some pictures early last week, and to get a feel for the experience you should read Tami’s post on her blog.

One of the big breaks was from producing content: between this blog and another blog I use for some other writing, I’m creating 15 or so pieces of content every week. When I took a break last week, I realized that is a fairly time-consuming sideline, and it was nice to let my mind stretch out and ruminate over things.

Here are four quick thoughts from my idle musing this week:

“Leads” is a term that is too loosely used and too loosely understood by media providers, lead generators and marketers. I’m watching the markets that I’m involved in get cluttered with misidentified leads. The result is troubling: a focus that should reduce cost and increase profits for marketers seems to be doing exactly the opposite. A “leads” arms race by the media partners will only clutter the market. My takeaway: I want to run a business that drives good leads and helps our customers make them better leads.

Media continues to be a powerful way to connect audience, information and merchants. The organic nature of media has changed, however. Media used to be associated with a format. Now, media is associated with an experience. Or something. What I do know is that media is more fluid and alive than ever.

The business cycle today reminds me of going to play basketball in a cold gym in the middle of the winter. Every ball was slick and flat. The secret was picking out the ball that was tight enough to have kept its air, and to keep dribbling with it until it warmed up and expanded. Voila, you had a ball that you could shoot and rebound. That’s the key: you can’t rebound a ball without air. In this business cycle, we can’t get discouraged that the ball feels flat…we’ve got to keep playing with it and warming it up.

And finally, experience is what differentiates products and services. Do you know what your experience is? Do you know what you want your experience to be? And do you know how to tell when your experience has gone sour? Those are questions I want to be able to answer.

So, I’m back to the blog. I did think to myself that I should scale back my posting schedule, but I suspect that is just a fleeting thought. I enjoy it too much.

We’re two-thirds of the way through a week of vacation at the Bahama Beach Club in Treasure Cay in the Abacos Islands. We’ve had a relaxing week with minimal distraction, changeable weather and a lot of beach time.

This hasn’t been a media-free experience: our condo has wi-fi service and a couple of flat-screens equipped with Direct TV. But the lure of the Great Abaco Sea is much more compelling, so we’ve been able to shift the rhythm of our day-to-day life.

Tami pointed out one big difference in our world: the absence of pervasive branding messages. The island is a lot like the world was back in the 70′s — no big brands, no blare of marketing and advertising, no pressure to capture your attention. What a difference.

Here are a few photos from down on the beach. This is a remarkably beautiful place.

The single content brand that I’ve had the longest relationship in my life is The New York Times.

Even though I grew up in New England, a highlight of the week was when my dad went and got the Sunday papers — the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal and The New York Times.

Five decades later, the New York Times is still a key element of my daily information routine.

I’m typing this post up in the small cottage my wife and I use for our Connecticut office. There’s snow everywhere, and I can see to the end of the driveway out my window. There’s a block of blue plastic propped up against the snow. It’s today’s copy of the Times.

Someone will probably bring it in later. But I’ve already had three interactions with my favorite newspaper.

The first was around 6am when I woke up and browsed the national and business stories on my iPhone. (I use the mobile browser version of the paper; their iPhone app is overly busy and slow.)

About an hour ago, I stopped for a cup of coffee and went to NYTimes.com to check out the sports and arts headlines. I read a couple of stories and then shifted over to my RSS reader (I’m a fan of the Firefox add-in Feedly.) I caught up on some of the economics writers that I like to follow.

The New York Times doesn’t have to worry about my loyalty to the brand. It stands out for its quality and its breadth.

But the New York Times does need to worry about its economics.

The change in how I access the Times is a good example of how its business model has shifted. Its audience is no longer a cohesive entity which it can leverage for commercial benefit. The audience has fragmented into distribution channels that don’t offer the same advertising payback.

As a consumer, I’m still paying a lot to get to the Times. I spend more than $1000 a year on my internet access and more than $1000 a year on my wireless access. I’m paying for the distribution pipe.

How does the NY Times turn its brand equity with me into money? The brand doesn’t have a consumer problem and it doesn’t have a content problem. The problem is in the relative economics of distribution and advertising in the new channels that I am reliant on.

There’s not a lot of advertising on the pages I’m encountering during my interactions with the Times. And the advertising that is there is nowhere near as lucrative as the advertising in the print version of the paper.

This is a shift from being a MEDIA brand to being a CONTENT brand.

When you’re a content brand, you need to be able to extract a significant amount of your profit from the value of your content. That payment will come either directly from the consumer or from the distribution pipe (think of Premium versus Basic cable channels.)

But in this ubiquitous information world with broad redistribution of content, the distribution pipes aren’t looking to pay to subsidize content creation.

And, if the New York Times wasn’t available on my iPhone or on the web, would I change carriers? Nope. I like the content and I’ve got a long-term relationship with the brand, but I don’t think that would be enough to change my communications and internet infrastructure.

This is a problem that challenges the economics of paying people to create quality content.

Interestingly, I think it’s where the content curation discussion becomes most relevant.

A brand like the New York Times, which has tremendous reach and authority, needs to find ways to expand and deepen its relationship with its consumer across the wireless and wired web. Curating content, building applications, creating micro-communities, turning its top journalists into entrepreneurial brands, picking and choosing where to invest money in highly differentiated and traditional reporting…this is the mix of content, focus and activity that can make the digital connections into increasingly profitable areas.

Here’s how the head of the NY Times is looking at it. The key business focus is finding ways to recover the content costs. I think there’s a bigger web to spin, which will help to support the cost of original content in a different way.

This has been a challenging time to be in a job. The industry doesn’t really matter, although the industries that I’m close to — housing, multi-family, media, marketing and publishing — have experienced challenges on an order of magnitude that none of us could ever imagine. But for everyone, the work of going to work, doing what you’re asked to do, managing people and dealing with customers is fraught with an undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty.

This is at the core of the national mood. A quick look at Gallup’s Economic Averages shows that the suppressed mood of Americans is barely changed from a year ago, despite a perception that the outlook for the job market is somewhat better.

Our day-to-day work life lacks the public and external validation, such as raises, promotions and bonuses, that helped boost our sense of self and well-being. I was reminded of this over the past week as we went through budget reviews at my company, NCI. Our teams have been incredible over the past two years, making balanced decisions about people, products and resources even while the business conditions have deteriorated around them. We’ve preserved our company, have improved our operating abilities and have innovated in exciting and promising ways. As we went through the presentations, I was struck by just how much has been done to define exactly what the benefit of each of our different services is, and to clear away any statement, activity or process that is not critical to delivering that benefit.

I was also struck by how little external reward there is in the current business climate. I can only recognize people and thank them.

But does that recognition have the same value as the more tangible rewards that were readily available in the past?

Maybe it does, if I’m able to be honest and authentic, and if my engagement with others is genuine.

In a reflective blog post this week,  the writer Scott Berkun exemplifies the power of candor.

In a list of his greatest professional mistakes, Berkun shuns cataloging business failures to take stock of  how aspects of his nature have kept him from realizing opportunities for growth.

Not learning to draw. I’m a visual thinker, at least some of the time. When I work with people on anything, I work at whiteboards and on big sheets of paper. But I can’t actually draw with sufficient aesthetics to warrant posting them here, or including them in books. This is a liability. But it’s one I plan to correct this year, as one of my goals for 2010 is to learn to draw. I’m working from Drawing on the Right side of the brain, and it’s going well so far.

The kind of self-awareness and honesty that Berkun promotes in this post is of great value today. In order to achieve a sense of balance, calm and productivity, each one of us can benefit from acceptance of ourselves and our circumstances. In that acceptance we’ll find tremendous opportunity.

I’ve had this conversation with a number of my colleagues over the past couple of years. At the center of rapid change, it is easy to lose your bearings.

As a manager, keeping those bearings is important to helping the people around you. I was reminded of this as I read an article from The Gallup Organization that looked at how to bolster employee confidence during these lean times.

The secret is to take a genuine interest in their future, to help them learn new skills and gain new experiences.

“This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.” Employees’ optimism about their standard of living also rises steadily with their level of agreement that they have opportunities at work to learn and grow. In fact, employees who strongly agreed in early 2009 that they have such opportunities were significantly more likely to feel their standard of living was getting better (50%) than to feel it was getting worse (33%).

The feeling of making progress against the long-term goal of their professional life creates a sense of mastery and confidence that diminishes the short-term discouragements of an adverse business cycle, the Gallup researchers say.

Two important touch points for a challenging time: Accept who you are and take a genuine interest in the people around you. These are enduring truths that are too easy to lose sight of when times are tough. But, these truths are about accepting the human spirit, being humbled by our lives and shedding the illusion that we can control the fates.

So what happened?

After months and months of a pretty steady production on ViralHousingFix, the publishing schedule got inconsistent. And, I’ve started a few things that I haven’t kept up, like The Good Reads posts.

It’s pretty simple. I’ve been taking some time to think.

Some questions and problems need to sift and filter. Around this time every year, I find myself reviewing the basic things that I’m thinking about and spending time on. Is the time well spent? And is the focus well reasoned?

This process of reflection is a lot of thought-crunching, paring each thing that I spend time on down to its essential and then to build it back up, looking for new opportunities for focus, invention and improvement.

Sometimes new ideas and emphasis come out of it. Sometimes I just try to make what I’m focusing on better.

When I found myself beginning to go through the filtering process recently, I realized that I needed to dial down the amount of content that I was taking in and putting out in order to focus better.

A few new themes are beginning to coalesce. I think you’ll see them bubble up in the content here. I’m finding new questions are popping up and I’m looking forward to trying to sort them out.

Over the past year, I’ve been encouraging our teams to have gain expertise about social media and have conversations with their customers about how these new tools can help them in their business.

Where I’ve met resistance is from people who ask, Why? Our business is advertising, and we’ve got print and internet products to sell. Talking about social media is off-point and doesn’t help.

My counter is that if we know a lot about something that our customers care about, we can help them, and that’s going to help us get into more conversations and have better relationships. And, I know from all my conversations that our customers and prospects are fascinated and perplexed by how to use social media tools in their business.

I found a useful passage in the conclusion of an industry report from Borrell Associates about real estate advertising that helps drive this point home.

Local media companies that can demonstrate a commitment to understanding their local markets more deeply than their competition, and a willingness to share that knowledge with local advertisers in a consultative relationship that is built patiently, with trust and respect, for the long term, will have the best chances for success. When a business is hearing from half a dozen ad media reps every month, it will take unprecedented focus, effort and resources to stand out.

Reading that made me ask myself, How many of our market representatives see the same value in sharing knowledge? And, how many of them feel confident about their own command of the information to share it with customers and prospects?

The terms mobile internet and applications are pretty much abstractions unless you are right in the middle of it.

If you’re not one of the 10 million people or so who’ve moved to the iPhone, let me give you a brief tour of Let me show you what it means.

The four images to the right are snapshots of the screens on my iPhone.

The way the iPhone is designed is that the icons on the bottom grey bar appear on each of your screens. The information at the very top band gives you basic information about your phone — the connections, the time and your battery life.

The four icons at the bottom access the basic functions of the device: the phone, your e-mail, your web browser and your media library.

You are able to download and install, through Apples App Store, different applications that enhance the utility of your device. There’s no real limit to the number of applications that you can install.

The first page of my iPhone apps have the ones that I use most frequently. My calendar, the camera, the photos database, and a bunch of different content applications. My key social media apps are on the front page — Facebook, Twitter and CubeTree, a social media platform we are testing within the company. I also have the Kindle app, because I have ended up using my iPhone as my primary eReader, and a couple of branded news sources: Bloomberg and ESPN. Foursquare and Yelp are on the front page because I’ve been testing both apps recently.

To get to the second page, you simply drag your finger across the screen from right to left and the new page comes up.

On the second page, you begin to see some of the flexibility of this device.

I have a couple of games installed on this screen, which are primarily used by my 4-year old. I’ve got three applications associated with my social media activity: Ego, which accesses my Google analytics, Twitter and Feedburner data on a real-time basis; Statistics, which shows the stats of my WordPress blogs, and a WordPress app that allows me to create blog posts and edit comments on the moves. There’s my Amazon cart, for shopping; my ApartmentFinder app, and some other basic components of the iPhone system.

Move to the third screen and you see some less frequently used tools. A flight tracking applications. A mind-mapping applications. An applications that tells me the schedule of MetroNorth trains. A movie finding applications. Some game.

The fourth screen has the same variety. A TV Guide app. The local news channel app, which allows me to get quick access to school closings and weather. A ski report app, which I recommend to any one who skis — you get the real scoop on snow conditions from the updates people leave. And, finally, an application that turns my iPhone into a remote for our Apple TV in the library.

There you have: a peek into the world of applications. Some of these applications cost money — the most expensive is probably Madden. I’ve downloaded and then deleted dozens more.

My web experience through the filter of applications is dramatically different than my web experience on my laptop. I am probably more brand-loyal in my app usage. I am definitely exposed to less advertising. And, my usage of Google is down, because I know exactly where I’m going for a bunch of different things. When I need to search, I’ll use the Google box in my Safari browser on the iPhone. But, I’m seeing a lot less of Googles advertising.

It’s a different ecosystem than what we’ve traditionally thought about for the experience of web content.

Congratulations to my friend and former colleague Doug Manoni, who was named CEO of Source Media this week.

Doug and I worked at Cowles Business Media through the better part of the 1990′s. At the end, Doug was my CFO.

He’s an interesting study for people who wonder about the future of business-to-business companies. Doug is a logical and sensible guy who understands that everything in the end comes down to cash: Who will pay you and who do you have to pay? He’s intellectually curious and enjoys interacting with new people. He doesn’t get overwhelmed by the things he doesn’t know and he’s grown more and more confident over the years in his own decisions.

This personality has helped Doug develop a bias towards extending diversifying his businesses to incorporate higher value content. He’s made this transition twice before from traditional advertising-based businesses successfully. I’m sure he’ll manage to do it again in this role.

[A note: the Chairman of Source, Marty Maleska, is member of the NCI board.]