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.

After three years of delays, Boeing finally delivered its first 787 Dreamliner this past Sunday to its very patient customer, Japan’s Nippon Airways.

The Boeing Dreamliner is probably the most innovative aircraft in the company’s history. It successfully blends design, function, and energy efficiency. The Dreamliner’s lightweight carbon fiber design and use of new plastic-composites translate into a 20 percent fuel savings. Inside the cabin, there is more headroom and larger stow bins, dynamic LED lighting, and larger windows that can be dimmed electronically.

The accolades for the Boeing Dreamliner are already pouring in. Yesterday, it received “Best in Show” at the 2011 annual conference for the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) in New Orleans.

But these awards can’t top its most important measure of success. Boeing has already received 800 orders for the Dreamliner valued at $164 billion, making it “one of the most successful commercial airplane launches” in history.

So it appears that the wait was worth it for Boeing.

Your company may be in the process of dreaming up your next best product or service. You too may struggle with delivery delays, glitches, and unexpected turbulence along the way.

Yet, it’s vitally important to push your team to improve upon what already has made your company successful.

Otherwise, you might find yourself stuck on the Tarmac wishing you had a better flight plan.

When things go wrong, it’s only human to want to point the finger and to blame someone or something else. Companies play the blame game too, and quite well I might add.

You don’t meet your quarterly targets, blame this event or that circumstance.

You fail to close a deal with a huge potential customer, blame this team or that team – or blame your competitor who undercut you.

Your new product advertisement falls flat. Blame your outside ad firm.

Finding a scapegoat is easy. Dealing with your own weaknesses and mistakes, and learning from them is much harder. That’s why both companies and people generally take the former route.

This past weekend, I had a close and personal encounter with blame.

I was awakened this past Friday at 5am by my three indoor cats growling at the front door at a cat on the outside of the door. I got up and peered out the window, and saw what I thought was our neighbor’s black cat. It was still dark outside and I was still in the fog of sleep.

My concern was that the cat had escaped its owner’s house and was now stranded outside in 20-degree weather. I took out some food, which the cat devoured. Just before the cat finished the food, I thought (or I didn’t think) that I would reach down and grab the cat, take it inside for a few hours, and then call the neighbor to come pick it up. This cat thought differently.

When I reached down to pick up the cat, in an instant, it turned and took a huge bite out of my hand, while pushing its back feet against my other hand. I ripped my hands away, and stood there with both hands bleeding while feeling pretty stupid for trying to pick up this cat. I knew now that it was not my neighbor’s cat.

My dumbness resulted in an emergency room visit in response to my bitten hand doubling in size and turning red with apparent infection. The hospital kept me two days to pump strong antibiotics into my body via IV to aggressively attack the toxins that were in my hand. An infectious disease doctor saw me and told me that this type of deep cat bite could do permanent damage to the use of my hand.

I kept telling myself, which was also echoed by my husband, that I had no one to blame but myself.

The hospital was so crowded they put me on the oncology floor with the cancer patients. On the first night, I shared a room with a feisty 82-year old woman who had come to the hospital due to bad reactions to the cancer drugs.

On the second day, they brought in an Egyptian woman in her mid-30s, along with her husband, her mother, her young daughter and several friends and family. She was so ill, so weak, so emaciated, and clearly suffering from the rages of her cancer and the treatments.

My wounds suddenly felt insignificant. Here I was blaming myself for my predicament, and learning from it — and this woman, wife, mother and daughter had no one to blame.

Over the holidays, a magazine cover caught my eye while I was browsing in a local bookstore. Its title, “Real Simple: 799 New Use for Old Things,” published by Time Inc.

Granted, I’ve seen these types of books or articles in the past, but something about this one at this moment in time struck a particular chord. Of course, the vibrant colors and appealing design of the cover (as shown above) helped get my attention.

Today, every aspect of our lives is controlled or influenced by some sort of complicated device. Many of us now read our books or newspapers on a slate-type screen. We have 900 channels on our cable or satellite boxes, and access to thousands of movies and shows “on demand,” not to mention the hundreds of thousands via the Internet.

Our home security systems rival that of small town banking institutions. And our cars talk to us and react to our own voice commands. A refrigerator can now tell me when my milk is expired, and may soon be reporting me to the anti-bacteria police.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-technology. But I am becoming increasingly pro-simple. Of course, some will argue that many of the technologies I cite above, and scores of others, provide conveniences that we could not have dreamed of 20 or 30 years ago. I guess that may be true, but at what cost to simplicity?

Some days, I long for the glow of a simple incandescent light or the simple latch of a screen door for a bit of added security. My friends love to tease me when I give them a ride in my 1997 base-model Jeep Cherokee, and they look around for the “window button“ to “roll down” the window. I happily point to the hand crank on the door and say, “you actually have to roll it down yourself.”

So on the eve of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where some of the world’s top companies will be showing off their magical new gadgets that will surely serve to dazzle, I’m thinking about how I can make things more simple in 2011.

Your company may want to put simplicity on its list of things to do in 2011 as well. Are there internal processes that you can reexamine, and actually make simpler – and more cost effective? Are there services that you provide to customers that could be retooled or streamlined to lead to simpler, not more complicated outcomes? Are there products that could be simplified and made more user-friendly?

Or, are there products or services that you currently offer, or maybe shelved a while back, that could actually be put to other good and simple uses?

These are all fair questions that any of us should be asking ourselves this coming year.

I’m betting simple will sell in 2011.

What’s that I hear? It’s the sound of an old, reliable manual cash register going “cha-ching.”

What exactly is business innovation? Is it a company’s ability to dream up a new and improved product? Is it a better way of doing business or providing services to your customers? Does it represent a more efficient and effective internal process within your company? Yes. Yes. And yes. All of the above.

To some, business innovation is a science – rational, methodical, and predictable. I prefer to see business innovation as more of an art – part science, but with a healthy dose of creativity and fearless ingenuity.

What is the genesis of the next best-selling car? It is a creative design team member, working on a white board or with clay, sculpting the outlines of the vehicle by hand, possibly mimicking the contours of another natural or man-made object that captures his or her imagination.

Then you bring in the engineers, the CAD team, the developers, and the focus groups to build out and test the proposition. But it starts with an idea, sparked by a creative moment by a talented employee.

How do I get one of those you might be asking? One of those creative employees who could be the ticket to your company’s next hot product or service? I’m guessing you already have more than one of these employees who are capable of such feats. Your challenge is to find and develop this talent.

Artists and innovators need the right stimulation. They need a suitable environment that promotes imaginative thought. And most importantly, they need a corporate culture that embraces, not discourages, new and original thinking.

Starting today, commit to a business innovation program that seeks to engage employees, managers, and executives in a new way. Shine light on those who show promise and inventive traits. Challenge them with provocative training and events that develop their talents. Cultivate the artist in them. Once you’re able to get this down to a science, you’ll likely be one step ahead of your competitors.

When I stopped into my local Starbucks this morning to get my usual tall cup of Joe, I found a store buzzing with a new entrant in its coffee line-up – instant coffee.

I must admit I was skeptical. Instant coffee? After all these years of treating my taste buds to the full-throated flavor of my Starbucks favorite blends such as Verona, Estima, and Sumatra, how can I take instant coffee seriously? The last innovation I witnessed in instant coffee was the “freeze-dried” branding of Taster’s Choice in the 1970s, which was a must-have for every college dorm room. Today, that same freeze-dried brew tastes a little too freezer-burned to me, with all due respect to Nescafe.

Yet, my coffee snobbery this morning quickly gave way to curiosity (and the notion of something free), and so I tried Starbucks’ new “VIA Ready Brew” (aka, instant coffee), which they were handing out in Dixie-like cups. And to my surprise, I liked it. Now, I will admit that it’s not quite in the league of my favorite fresh-ground brew I’m accustomed to, but it’s remarkably good considering it is, well, instant.

Give Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz credit, it’s a pretty gutsy move. This is the same guy who swam against the tide years ago, and proceeded to build a corporate empire one cup at a time — when most everyone else at the time was saying, “you can’t get rich selling coffee.”

Today Starbucks has more than 5,000 stores in over 40 countries. Sure, it had to close a few stores over the last year and dial back some prices in light of the bad economic times. But its stock is up 75% in the last 6 months. I like that math.

So stay tuned. Will Starbucks’ gamble on instant coffee pay off? Wall Street didn’t seem too impressed given SBUX closed down over one percent today, despite its big instant coffee roll-out.

But I don’t count Starbucks out, and for this reason. Its success to date is not simply the result of great coffee and market savvy. It also has something to do with how management runs the company and how they treat their employees (or “partners” as they are called). Starbucks routinely gets some of the highest marks in corporate America in terms of employee satisfaction, and “best places to work.”

As Howard Schultz puts it, “We realize our people are the cornerstone of our success, and we know that their ideas, commitment and connection to our customers are truly the essential elements in the Starbucks Experience.”

Happy and satisfied employees lead to greater productivity and greater innovations. And companies that get this important point, and live by it, will generally prosper.

In fact, prosperity has been known to have a very distinctive aroma. It smells like a great cup of instant coffee.