I’ve just watched Springsteen win a Golden Globe for best song in a movie and have watched awareness in him grow and polarization of his fans happen almost simultaneously.

He supports Obama and stumped for him and Kerry. His record company has put out a “Greatest Hits” CD in an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart. He’s been churning out albums at a rate he’s never done before (Working on A Dream comes out in 2 short weeks). He’s singing at the Super Bowl half time show. The list goes on and so does the critisism. Why?

He’s a folk singer who wants to make a better United States through action and using what he’s got (a poets heart, a mass appeal and a fearless quest for clarity). He watched a good friend and fellow E-Streeter die at too young an age and must have realized his own mortality. He is now taking advantage of what he rightly has earned.

So critics and fans alike, sit back and enjoy his contributions and stop thinking so hard about the why, just enjoy the now.

Stop calling please. Stop calling to ask if my company needs insurance. Stop calling to see if my company needs office space. Stop calling to see if my company needs a business model. Stop calling to see if my company needs computer equipment, telephone services, BlackBerry’s, or anything else you might think I need.

Stop calling please.

Rove was featured in a recent daily Ottawa Citizen (found here) article and since then I’ve received dozens of calls from people trying to sell me all of the above. This is my formal plea to ask you all to update your business model and realize that EVERYONE in your business trolls the newspapers and calls the companies featured in them. This is NOT original, NOT helpful and shows, IMHO, purely passive (read: LAZY) sales.

This isn’t the first time this has happened but this has certainly resulted in the largest number of calls to date. The last time we were featured, some over zealous sales guy sent me a card with all the clippings I’ve ever been in — now that was just creepy.

One incident stuck with me. One of the last times we were featured in the Citizen (found here), a salesperson who sold me my first suit 15 years ago from one of my favorite stores (Harry Rosen) sent me a simple card congratulating us on our success. Simple, elegant and I am a lifelong Harry Rosen shopper as a result.

Who knows, use a little bit of TRUE effort and people may actually buy from you.

This past September 23rd an institution turned 59 years old.

This institution is neither a bank nor a company, not even a department of something. That day was the birth of a body of work that has spanned 5 decades, thousands of prose, endless movements and marathon recitals. September 23rd 1949 was the day that Bruce Springsteen came to be in a tiny town north of Asbury Park called Long Branch.

Springsteen is obviously well-known for a few things – his prescient lyrics, his ability to channel the disenchanted, he’s been a slogan during presidential campaigns, won a Grammy and an Oscar and, when needed, has harnessed the voices of Guthrie, Seeger and Dylan – but what is most impressive is the fervour with which his customers support his efforts.

His singular focus on the audience, his customers, while on stage has become legendary – on par with his music – in fact; self-proclaimed non-fans flock to his shows out of curiosity and walk away in bewilderment. How does he do it? How does he keep a legion of fans coming back while enticing others to buy tickets for the first time? It’s pretty simple, he says, he leaves everything on stage every single night.

What happens behind the scenes is where the lessons are truly learned.

It starts with his product, the music. His lyrics strike a chord because they speak the same language and resonate in a way that connects the music with the listener – they speak to all our intricacies. His live performances are tantamount to a religious revival – hands swaying to the music in unison. His is the complete offering, a 40-year in the making success, built one raving fan at a time…the way business should be built.

Springsteen’s only goal as he steps on the stage every night is to give his customers an experience that measures up to the value they put on the ticket they purchased. He wants to give them their money’s worth. People come to see his legendary 3 hour live performances solely as a result of other peoples’ experiences and they leave as fans – his entire career has been about getting people in the door for a trial and sending them home in a state of disbelief as sometime during the night, they became raging fans.

His was a conscious effort – the shows became legendary before his music did – and as awareness grew, he set himself apart from the other Jersey Shore performers by going steps beyond what they offered, by becoming known for what he provides – great value – as opposed to what his competitors provide – a standard offering. His meticulous, almost maniacal focus on the outcome – on the stage or in the studio — ensured a completely unique experience for his customers and, as a result, they brought their friends to his shows and indoctrinated them.

Springsteen learned very early on that customer satisfaction is very different from a completely satisfied customer.

Business today should take heed of Springsteen’s search for connection with his fans. He built his reputation through a singular desire to outperform, out write and outlast his competition and companies that follow this mantra will have customers as unwavering as Springsteen’s focus on the crowd at his feet.

As we moved towards the first set of rapids you could feel both a sense of urgency and impending doom. The sun, dominant from the moment we left shore, was now hidden behind storm clouds and lightning lit up the dark skies. Ominous. We were 13 people jammed into a floating dirigible heading straight at something called McCoys Chute on the mighty Ottawa River and it dawned on me that we were all voluntarily paddling forward despite the raging river in front.

Maybe it wasn’t at that very moment that I considered the boat as a metaphor for the enterprise and the raging river, the turbulent wireless handheld space but you can understand that those shouldn’t be one’s final thoughts. It wasn’t until later, much later, that this concept dawned.

That rubber boat we were all steering towards impending death was, in fact, going there without our help. We may have been inside the boat, we may have been paddling, we may have even been ready for what was to come but we were certainly not in control once we set our direction for the tongue of the river. It was bringing us there whether we liked it or not, the question now became how to navigate our enterprise through the rolling white water to a safe destination.

When the iPhone 3G was introduced with enterprise capabilities, the wireless handheld world went from paddling on flat water to a raging river overnight and made it so enterprises, large or small, around the world couldn’t ignore this space anymore. With all the hype and turmoil it was hard to distinguish myth from reality but the reality is that once a path is set in the enterprise, it is very hard to veer off into another direction.

While the second-generation iPhones have enterprise capabilities, the ability to adopt the device into large organizations is not quite there yet. A recent survey of senior wireless experts done by InMobile.org showed that nearly 70% of respondents indicated that they would not move from the BlackBerry to the iPhone within their enterprise in the near future and there are many reasons. Something as simple as the lack of a replaceable battery could have a huge impact on those that have to support the iPhone but that pales in comparison to how one installs software on the device.

In order to add software to the iPhone, the application needs to be hosted on the iTunes Application store on one of Apple’s servers. This means anyone interested in distributing software to the device needs to first upload the application to a server outside of their secure network and then ask everyone to download it from outside their secure environment as well. Not going to happen.

But I would say the biggest hurdles are the cost of the infrastructure and the existing contractual commitments currently in place. People have staked their jobs on the hardware/software decisions they’ve made while carriers aren’t likely to let enterprises out of long-term service contracts without serious penalties.

These hurdles aren’t insurmountable over time. I would bet the farm that Steve Jobs is currently reinventing the way large enterprises manage mobile devices and the software on them from his office in Cupertino. While he is doing this, contracts will run out and decisions will need to be made but that won’t be for quite some time yet.

Ultimately what ended up happening with both the iPhone launch and our brush with McCoys Chute was a lot of rolling, splashing, noise, hype and excitement. We all bounced around, even lost a few people overboard, but we made it through with greater resolve and more confidence that we could take the next set of rapids, and the next, and the next, and come out unscathed – we have no choice, we’ve chosen our path.

This is what I love about living so close to the Madawaska River – you can jump in your car, rent a canoe and be on the water 2 hours after you leave your office.

I just returned from a 2.5 day trip down the mighty Madawaska with my father, brother, sister and two life-long friends of the family — a trip the six of us have done before but not in some time. The water was higher than I’ve ever seen it which changes the way you navigate the river as some of the smaller rapids were washed right away while some of the larger ones became more fierce (or were they the same and I’m a little older?).

The greatest part of the trip was the camping spots. Night 1 is on an island surrounded by rapids on either side and night 2 in on a peak at the foot of a winding, S-shaped rapid. Both are stunning, both make me wonder why I don’t do more of this.

No business speak in this post, just one lesson: Take some time to do something that takes you away from the norm…