Nothing says November like the feel of wearing a wool sweater from L.L. Bean.

I’ve been a fan of L.L. Bean’s no-frills, long-lasting clothing products for over 30 years. They are comfortable, affordable, and always get the job done.

If I had a dollar for every “Blucher Moc” moccasin shoe that L.L. Bean has sold over the years, I would, well, have a lot of dollars. The shoe is timeless and iconic, and the product description today was the same 30 years ago: “The handsewn upper conforms to your foot for a fit that only gets better with time. Traditional rubber sole has channel grooves to provide traction on wet surfaces.” Current retail price: $69 a pair.

If it ain’t broke, keep selling it. Or something like that.

L.L. Bean owes its success not only to great products, but to great customer service. Year after year, L.L. Bean ranks among America’s top 10 companies for customer service according to the National Retail Federation, based on written surveys of over 9,000 shoppers.

The company was founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean in Freeport, Maine — a place that knows something about the importance of keeping warm and dry. Today, L.L. Bean’s flagship store and campus is still in Freeport on the original site where Bean opened his retail business.

Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the 200,000-square-foot flagship store draws nearly three million visitors each year.

Next year marks L.L. Bean’s 100th anniversary. Few companies on the planet survive long enough to celebrate this milestone, much less one that is still at the top of its game. The company’s annual sales now top $1.5 billion.

L.L. Bean wrote the book on succeeding as a mail-order business, and decades later was able to successfully pivot to capitalize on the e-commerce revolution. Like its famed Blucher Moc, L.L. Bean has been able to effectively adapt and conform “for a fit that only gets better with time.”

Yet, L.L. Bean’s current President, Chris McCormick, knows that the company’s success will continue to rely on its commitment to putting the customer first: “It goes back to L.L.’s Golden Rule of treating customers like human beings.”

That’s using the old bean from which we all can learn.

Speaking of fortune, most every Fortune 500 company in America has jumped into the social media fray over the past year, whether it’s a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, or both.

Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly given companies new ways to get the message out beyond the traditional press release, corporate website, or a corporate blog for that matter. The challenge, of course, is not saying something — but actually saying something meaningful.

Whether it’s a short Facebook status update or a very short 140-character-limited Twitter post, knowing what to say and how to leverage this new medium has corporate executives scrambling to find value.

Corporate leaders are also wrestling with the individual vs. business nature of social media. Twitter by design is the short muttering of an individual, even when it’s in the name of an organization.

Since its inception, individuals have flocked to the Twitter platform to chronicle important events such as: “Just had a great bowl of chili,” or “Sitting on tarmac at JFK already hating person in 24B sitting next to me.” Not quite the makings of Pulitzer prize-winning material.

Then comes along a CEO or the SVP for Communication or a Business unit head, and a new Twitter account set up to drive corporate messaging, and it quickly goes from the personal mundane to corporate tripe.

Yet, with all its warts, I still think this new medium has something to offer and should be taken seriously.

Throughout our nation’s history, business enterprises have sought to leverage each new wave of communication innovation, including the printing press, radio, television, and the Internet. And at each juncture, trial and error has eventually given way to a valuable return on investment.

For example, as recently as ten years ago, many traditional brick and mortar stores struggled to find value in an online presence. And today, many of them are leveraging the Internet not simply as a supplement to their bottom lines, but as a huge driver for their bottom lines and highly cost-effective way to reach target customers, e.g., Walmart.com.

Ten years from today, the same will be said for the micro-blogs. Already, Twitter and Facebook have literally helped change the geopolitical landscape in countries such as Egypt, where these new forms of communication have played a leading role in spreading ideas, actions, and change.

I’m betting these technologies will also soon lead to innovative business practices and the next generation of successful enterprises and corporate leaders, who will find smart ways to leverage their potential.

That will be something worth tweeting about.

The I Love Lucy television show first aired on this day in 1951. It starred then-Hollywood legend Lucille Ball, whose zany and fresh comedic antics helped turn the sitcom into the most watched television show of its era.

Ball’s trademark blazing red hair and slapstick humor was an unlikely pairing with her co-star, Desi Arnaz. Arnaz, who played Lucy’s husband Ricky Ricardo, was also her real-life husband during the run of the show. Arnaz was a dark-haired Cuban American singer and bandleader, whose memorable heavy accent and exclamations on the show continue to resonate to this day.

CBS executives at the time questioned whether the U.S. television audience would accept the idea of an All-American redhead married to a Cuban. Those fears quickly turned to celebration as I Love Lucy went on to become one of the most popular television sitcoms of all time. Sixty years after its debut, reruns of I Love Lucy are still viewed by more than 40 million Americans each year.

On the show, Lucy and Ricky were joined by co-stars Vivian Vance and William Frawley, who played Ethel and Fred Mertz. Vance and Frawley were perfectly cast as the Ricardos’ neighbors, landlord, and best friends. To this day, I still laugh thinking about the scene of Lucy and Ethel working in the chocolate factory on the production line.

Lucille Ball not only broke new ground as a leading female character of a television sitcom, she also served as the first woman to head a television production company, Desilu, which she and Arnaz formed. As a very active studio head at Desilu, Ball “pioneered a number of methods still in use in television production today such as filming before a live studio audience with a number of cameras, and distinct sets adjacent to each other.”

Whether it’s a television studio, and large corporation, or a small or medium size business, chief executives need to be willing to move outside of their safe zone in order to innovate and try new approaches. Success in business comes from bold leadership, a strong team, and promoting a culture that embraces an inventive spirit.

That’s a winning formula I know your shareholders will love.

It’s hard to add to what has already been said from so many corners of the globe about the enormous contributions of Steven Paul Jobs to the fields of technology, movies, music, telecommunications, and design itself. But I do feel compelled to say something about Mr. Jobs. We just lost our country’s Chief Innovator.

Steve Jobs was a once-in-a-generation visionary who demonstrated a unique blend of design, business, and marketing savvy. He took a quirky, irrelevant computer company named after a fruit, which he co-founded in the 1970s, and turned it into a global business powerhouse boasting the largest market cap of any other company on the planet  – equaled only by Exxon Mobil.

The last decade, in particular, has been truly impressive as Jobs led Apple as it redefined the music industry via the iPod, wireless communication via the iPhone, and more recently, the computer itself via the iPad.

Jobs didn’t always get it right. In 1985, after being fired by Apple, he started the NeXT computer company. NeXT folded in 1996 after shipping only 50,000 units, but its high performance personal computers impressed many, including Apple, which re-hired Jobs in 1997.

Most important, Jobs learned from his mistakes and he wasn’t afraid to make them. At every turn in his career, he ignored traditional business school dogma, and chose to take a different path – always guided by what he felt the consumer wanted.

Jobs concluded that consumers would be willing to pay more for a product if it was well-designed and simple to use.  He was right, and Apple and its shareholders have benefited handsomely.

Business schools will be studying the “Jobs Effect” and his hyper-successful business methods for years to come, and rightfully so.

At some point, there will be another Steve Jobs. He or she will also achieve success by eschewing the safe path. And most likely, he or she too will succeed as a result of a keen focus on innovation, smart design, and creative business approaches.

Yet there is something about the current debt ceiling debate that makes me think that there is much more at stake in this discussion than the usual Democratic and Republican skirmishes. The threshold question that confronts every American is whether our country should continue to ramp up historic and seemingly unsustainable debt, or should we take a meat axe to scores of federal programs that so many Americans have come to rely upon.

I’ll not use this blog to pontificate on my own personal political bias on this question, but I will say this: our country’s leaders need to find a way to talk to one another and work this out. I’m hoping for less hot rhetoric and finger-pointing and more substantive discussion and responsible leadership.

Whether it’s in a board room, a corporate conference room, a manager’s office, or in the Cabinet Room, heated and anger-toned debate serves no interests. I’ll put my money any day on the cool and level-headed executive or political leader than the hot-headed, barb-thrower.

Shareholders deserve this sort of cool-headed responsibility from corporate executives, and the American citizens deserve the same out of their elected or appointed government leaders.

With these words, the United States marshaled an unprecedented level of innovative and scientific forces to accomplish this seemingly unreachable goal. In doing so, new generations of Americans became interested in science and space. Educators, students, and the American society at large embraced this ambitious goal with a level of enthusiasm not seen before or since this period in history.

And eight years later on July 21, 1969 astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to step foot on the Moon.

Undoubtedly, this country’s excitement and focus on science and space in the 1960s helped plant many of the seeds that led to America’s leadership in technology over the next several decades, including the microcomputer, software, and the Internet.

With this week’s 135th and last launch of the U.S. Space Shuttle, I find myself longing for a new, seemingly unreachable goal that can spark this country’s ingenuity and innovative spirit once more. Else, I fear that we will continue to slip further behind other countries like China and India, which are turning out four times as many math, engineering, and science graduates as the United States.

Let’s hope our country’s next Moon shot comes sooner rather than later.

I can’t say that it’s a favorite song of mine, but the song surely resonates with my husband. Leave it to country music to always win the day in the lyrics category. And as lyrics go, “As Good As I Once Was” is as good as it gets.

The song spent six weeks at the top of Country music charts in 2005 and helped to make Keith one of the most popular singer-songwriters of the past decade.

“As Good As I Once Was” may also resonate with your company as suggested in this verse:

“I ain’t as good as I once was,
My, how the years have flown,
But there was a time back in my prime
When I could hold my own.”

Has your company seen better days? Were you once number one in your product category, or higher up the charts than you are now? Odds are that your employees may be less motivated today than they were a few years back when your workforce was probably younger and hungrier. But don’t worry, you’re not alone. I’ve probably just described over half of the Fortune 500.

Many companies today are looking over their shoulder to find younger and more ambitious competitors on their heels. Or worse yet, you may already be looking at their taillights.

There are ways to turn maturity and experience to your company’s advantage. Sure, your organization and employees may be less nimble than they were a decade ago, but you can draw upon the expertise that comes with age. The key will be to find ways to inspire and incent your workforce through creative compensation and reward programs.

A motivated workforce also starts with motivated managers. Make sure you are utilizing innovative executive and manager training programs to spur more inspired leaders.

In the end, you should not try to match your younger opponents step-by-step, but should seek to ensure that each step counts and is smarter and more efficient based on valuable experience and perspective.

That’s the type of company I would want to work for. Then again, I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was.

For almost 10 years, U.S. military and intelligence forces worked round-the-clock to track down and bring the world’s most hunted man to justice. And their patience and persistence paid off with Osama bin Laden’s death on May 1 at the hands of Navy SEAL Team Six.

As the news of bin Laden’s demise spread at the speed of Twitter last Sunday night, Americans spontaneously rejoiced. No one was more pleased to receive this news than the family members of the 3,000 people who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

With each passing year, it appeared that bin Laden’s trail was growing colder and colder. Yet, the focus and commitment to find him never dimmed among those within our national security ranks, who were responsible for completing the mission.

While some unfulfilled missions may require eventual termination, others are much too important to the core principles of an organization to abandon.

Seek to identify those mission critical objectives within your organization, and pursue them with vigor and perseverance.

It may very well make the difference in your company’s survival.

What is it about a royal wedding that draws us all in? At 11am yesterday (British time), an estimated 3 billion people around the planet watched as Prince William and Kate Middleton tied the knot. A cool one million people watched live as they lined the streets of London during the wedding procession.

For the weeks leading up to the royal wedding, media outlets from around the globe spent countless column inches and on-air hours in pre-event coverage on every conceivable aspect of the soon-to-be-wed couple. All of this coverage was clearly fed by an unquenchable thirst of viewers and readers — from every walk of life and background — to soak in as much about this storybook wedding as possible.

Even though I was not part of the millions who staged “watch parties” here in the U.S. in the wee hours of the morning, I did record the entire ceremony and coverage via DVR, which I watched from start to finish last night.

I’m simply amazed at how this one wedding has so captivated our planet. Beyond the natural allure of royalty, maybe our fascination also has something to do with a desire to at least momentarily escape from the recent ravages of wars, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes and nuclear disasters.

In any case, now comes the hard part for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, as they are now known. They have to get along as they lead very public lives.

The most difficult part of any marriage is learning how to get along with one another after all the dust settles from the pomp and circumstance of the wedding. Same can be said for the corporate world and the thousands of mergers and acquisitions that occur each and every year.

Companies which come together must find a way to effectively blend much more than payroll, IT, and HR systems if they are to succeed – they must also find a way to successfully blend corporate cultures.

Like William and Kate who come from very different backgrounds (as we know all too well thanks to the media), companies that merge have to arrive at a new corporate culture that suits the newly combined entity.

The tendency is for the dominant company (e.g., the one doing the acquiring) to impose its culture on the company being acquired. This will result in grumpy employees and poor performance if employees of the acquired company are told overnight to abandon their own culture. (Note the grumpy expression in the photo above of three-year old Grace van Cutsem, who was part of yesterday’s wedding ceremony.)

In reality, many elements of the culture of the dominant company can likely continue in the newly combined company. However, executives should work hard to embrace aspects of both cultures that are worthy of renewal, while seeking to chart a new overall culture that will help to bring employees together in a productive way.

This will ensure that your storybook wedding will also lead to a long-lived and profitable storybook marriage.

With this one short line, Scheider and the characters played by a young Richard Dreyfuss and the late Robert Shaw capture the moment perfectly. They realize that the challenge before them is much larger than the size of their original game plan.

Each year, many companies and their management teams, experience similar types of eye-opening events as they find themselves responding to a sudden man-made or natural disaster. Think BP, Toyota, AIG, GM or the many companies in Japan currently affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami. Less notable companies also experience this sort of wake-up call as they watch a major customer walk away or find themselves scrambling to recover in the wake of a company misstep or scandal.

It is in these moments that company executives and managers are tested. Some companies successfully brave these storms and, as a result, come out stronger and more focused. Others, however, capsize and reach for the aid of a bargain-basement buyer or a bankruptcy raft.

Admittedly, there is no fail-safe way to plan for these unexpected events. But there are ways in which you can appreciably better your chances for survival with the right sort of training and preparation.

Don’t wait until your near-death moment to find out if your company is prepared to look into the jaws of catastrophe and survive. Put in place the right-sized game plans that will effectively respond to both big and small events that could serve to push your boat off course or potentially take you down.