There is nothing more beautiful, or more powerful, than coming together to solve a problem. When we get frustrated, infuriated or slightly homicidal during a meeting it is because something is getting in the way of solving the problem at hand. Ironically, the worst resource for solving a problem is also our most abundant: opinions. Opinions represent our worst collaborative habits. Habits which, if we can learn to break, will greatly increase our collective productivity.

Your mission statement sucks… probably. I have seen hundreds of them, and 99% of them are pointless, self-engrandizing, delusional, ambiguous crap. They tend to serve little value outside of being a reflection of some C-level executive’s ego. This is unfortunate, because a great mission statement can go long way to codify an organization’s culture and leadership.

For fellow borderline Millennials, who remember when the Internet was pre-Facebook, it was a very different place. Instead of click-bait headlines and toxic banter between now-estranged friends and family, it was place of community and blogging... lots and lots of blogging. Text ruled the web, with actual writers and thinkers (OK, and still lots of conspiracy theorists) leading the forums and "web rings." I’m beginning to wonder if the rising social platform Medium.com might just restore the art of prose and deliver the best promises of the Internet after all.

The current 8 episodes of the Toys That Made Us documentary series on Netflix is a wonderful bath of nostalgia, but it is also an amazing hindsight-is-20/20 course on marketing and product development. While the toys themselves are all very different, there are several core themes that emerge when covering the successes and failures across all of them. These are lessons that too many businesses learn too late.

In a nutshell, magical thinking is a psychological term referring to a common mental error of confusing a correlation to causality. A simple example is, “My sports team seems to win more when I wear my lucky hat.” In business, these mental errors cause major mistakes in marketing and management. We look at things other people are doing in business and misinterpret the effects and results, then try to apply them to ourselves in over simplistic or misunderstood ways. I think the world of marketing is the worst offender bordering on insanity.

Should you change your brand? Is it time to change your logo, your tagline or even your company name? This question is often presented to business owners when they begin to take their marketing seriously. Marketing agencies and designers love making new brands because it’s like getting a brand new car.