Notwithstanding Black Friday, where Americans showcase their ugly consumerist tendencies, the long Thanksgiving weekend is an important time for me to disconnect from the grid and assess the future.

Putting aside personal concerns about the economy, I believe we’re entering an important period of business cleansing and rebalancing. There’s too much clutter, waste and distrust. Now, more than ever, it’s important to focus on fundamentals, especially deeper purpose. What is your business existence really all about? Value and meaning are not only longed for — they’re now necessary to compete and win in the marketplace.

In a recent blog post at Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque, a strategist at the Havas Media Lab, underscored this mandate for businesses in the 21st century. Appropriately citing lessons from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Haque began by noting the need to minimize strategy: “Obama’s campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naïve sense: strategy as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn’t waste resources trying to dominate the news cycle, game the system, strong-arm the party, or out-triangulate competitors’ positions. Rather, Obama’s campaign took a scalpel to strategy - because they realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.”

Then Haque’s emphasis on maximizing purpose: “Change the game? That’s 20th century thinking at its finest - and narrowest. The 21st century is about changing the world. What does ‘yes we can’ really mean? Obama’s goal wasn’t simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign. It was larger and more urgent: to change the world…And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can. You must maximize, stretch, and utterly explode your sense of purpose.”

I don’t believe we’re entering a post-strategic era, or that strategy is the opposite of purpose. However, far too many business leaders have lost sense of what their purpose is. They’re ships without a compass that points anywhere beyond profit. Their crewmembers typically can’t articulate what they’re doing, nor why others should join. It’s especially evident amidst the largest companies, many of which have become giant, self-absorbed and calculating machines. Think about the U.S. auto, finance and airline industries. Consider the advertising industry!

The good news is that purpose increasingly represents fundamental opportunity and advantage. Having purpose means knowing one’s self, as well as solving real customer problems. Maximizing purpose makes it easier for relevant customers to affiliate with you and develop preference. Purpose is what makes success possible.

What’s your purpose?

(The above also was my latest MediaPost column.)

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Social technologies and today’s “always on” culture will certainly need to be factored into the transformation of U.S. automakers - and will eventually impact the way all industries function.  I wonder if this means we’ll return to six- and seven-day work weeks…if we’re not there already.  I imagine more telecommuting, microslicing of days, greater use of social technologies for business.  These seem to be the hallmarks of the ”information revolution” to follow the industrial revolution. Strangely enough, the cadence of our work seems to resemble life before the industrial revolution, albeit with a much higher standard of living.  And I’m not sure if things are getting better or worse.

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I’m psyched to be going nowhere this Thanksgiving. I’ll be at home with my mom (in from Australia) and my brother (in from China). Of course, Laura, Julian and Celeste are at the center of it all. There’s no place like home.

For me, Thanksgiving is the best holiday because:

1. It’s simple (versus Christmas).
2. It includes a long weekend to rest.
3. Home-cooked comfort food is central.
4. A few glasses of good wine is expected.
5. Three days of the long weekend follow any food and wine binging that takes place on the first day.
6. The obsessively connected, professional world usually exits the grid.
7. I don’t have to be anywhere, so I can generally avoid the materialistic mayhem of Black Friday.
8. We’re not into full winter, so the climate is usually optimal for getting outside (at least around New York, where it’s now sunny and 47 degrees Fahrenheit).
9. There’s usually enough Thanksgiving leftovers to feed a family for days (read: instant meals and craving satisfaction).
10. With the exception retail stores, people are mostly in a good mood.
11. Finally, it’s refreshing when so many people stop at once to think about what they’re thankful for, versus continue calculating how they’re going to attain what they don’t yet have.

(Importantly, the only turkey I really adore is the one above. I’ll be preparing roast leg of lamb, along with sweet-potato puree and pumpkin soup (the guts of our Halloween pumkin). Laura is preparing pumpkin-pecan pie.)

Fortunately, the Disqus registration system I use is dirt simple. In fact, it’s a lot easier to use than those annoying captcha systems. All you need is an email address and password, and you don’t have to leave this site to activate. Just go through the regular comment process, and you’ll be directed accordingly.

Better yet, Disqus is common across many of the most popular blogs and content sites on the Web. That means if you already registered a Disqus profile somewhere else on the Web, there’s no need to register again. But if you do register here, your profile automatically empowers you to comment everywhere else Disqus is enabled. There are other benefits as well, which explains why MOST readers readers of this blog used to register anyway.

Importantly, I want to encourage your interaction. Therefore, please let me know if this registration requirement deters your participation. If you don’t want to leave a public comment, you can contact me this way.

Do You Ever Do Any Real Work? That’s a question I used to get all of the time in the early days of this blog. I don’t get it so much anymore. Because slowly but surely people are wising up to the fact that blogging is work and its a very valuable use of my time…the time and energy I’ve put into this blog for the past five years has built a unique and very sophisticated audience. You are connectors and hubs of influence..But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference. And that’s one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large. Its about the “realest” work I do.

And I share these sentiments precisely. You, my readers, are connectors and hubs of influence. You’re also my neighbors, friends, family, colleagues and sometimes harsh (but helpful) critics. You share your ideas, build on mine and help shape context in my world. You’re an important presence in my professional and personal life, which, for better or worse, blurs more everyday. You are why I keep writing, commenting, discussing and participating. For these tremendous gifts, I thank you.

Importantly, I also thank Fred for leading with progressive thinking on how businesses and individuals must interact and manage relationships in this age of open connections and online reputation. He leads by example. It also happened to be his blogging that brought me together with him, and then me together with Clickable, which his firm backs. Of course, I’m grateful for that as well.