The Tiger Woods episode should remind all of us once again to respond fast to the news media, tell the truth and get on with. Dragging it out as he did added several days to a story that could have been over in two news cycles.

President Obama’s approval rating continues to decline. As a strictly non-partisan independent, I see him doing exactly what George W. Bush did right after his second election, but from a different philosophical point of view. Obama, like Bush, seems to be throwing all kinds of mud at the wall hoping like hell something sticks. Obama, like Bush, seemingly has a different agenda or country he’s travelling to every day. The message has blurred and focus is diminishing. (Retrievable, of course.)

Employees in many companies call this “program of the day.”  Saying to themselves, “First management is talking about such and such. Next they’re talking about something else. We just tune it out because eventually it’ll all go away.”   Isn’t that what’s happening?

For business leaders, the lesson is the same. Create your “story.” Tell it through what you say and what you do. Keep telling it over and over through your walk and talk. And then when you think you’ve told it as many times as you need to and you’re sick of telling it, tell it one more time.

In that respect, running for office and governing in business or politics is very much the same.

A business case for social media, or anything else, can be made when something (like social media) creates a gain in operating or financial performance/business measures that is greater than the investment made to generate the gain. While there are certainly isolated examples where elements of social media have improved information exchange and produced good business outcomes, it’s a huge stretch to say they’ve had a major impact on revenues, product or service quality, costs, cycle time or productivity, which are the measures used in determining a business case.

Recently I heard a couple of social media “experts” speak at a conference. They spent more than an hour gushing about activity—all the social media things companies were doing. But my mother’s voice kept filling my head as these guys spoke. I think all mothers read the same book that said: When your son or daughter says everyone is doing something, here’s the right way to respond: “Just because everybody’s doing something doesn’t necessarily make it right. If everyone were jumping off a thousand foot cliff, should you jump off the cliff?”

So I asked the guys if the companies they were talking about had experienced better business performance after all their investments in social media activity.

“Oh, I’m sure they have,” the lead expert answered.

“Do you have any examples,” I asked.

“Well, no, but I’m sure they have or they wouldn’t be doing it.”

Yeah, right.

The blog is an outgrowth of The Leadership Report, a monthly electronic newsletter focused on improving organizational performance through strong leaders and passionate, turned-on people. The Report was an outgrowth of my book, The Leadership Solution, which was designed to help leaders improve performance by connecting people to strategy.

This blog represents a broader landscape. Rather than focusing on a couple of thematic subjects as I have in my book and the Report, I’ll address a wide range of topics connected to my world—a world of organizations, great and mediocre leaders, high performing and under-performing teams, loyal and pissed-off customers, clients looking to escape old ways and wanting to ask new questions—the world of consulting, speaking, conducting workshops and traveling via planes, trains and automobiles.

I’ll suggest new thinking and new books and articles that I view as worth your while. I’ll share best practices that may take you to new heights. We’ll cover a wide range of organization issues such as leadership, communication, involvement, goals and measurement, learning, work processes, people processes, business literacy, organization structure, open book management, rewards, recognition, six sigma, lean, engagement and more.

I’ll celebrate great leaders I know and work with and, without naming names, I’ll pick on the bizarre behavior of control freaks, organizational politicians, CYA afficionadoes, status quo guardians and those who exemplify The Peter Principle (people who’ve risen to their level of incompetence). These are people who serve as huge barriers organizational success. They represent organizational friction that needs to be eliminated for any organization to reach full potential.

Most of all, I want this to be an interactive forum. A best way to learn and grow is to share, toss ideas back and forth and grow them, then use them to make things better.

So welcome. Hang on. Let’s get going.

I had the pleasure of working with Tom Downs when he became chairman and CEO of Amtrak. Tom is brilliant, articulate, well-read, irreverent and has an infectious sense of humor. In his first meeting with his top 115 leaders, Tom admonished them: “If you remember nothing else from this meeting, remember these four words: “Always tell the truth.”

Telling the truth became the norm at Amtrak in those days. If there was ever doubt about how Amtrak officials were to respond to the news media, how a supervisor was to communicate to a conductor in the Northeast Corridor or how an employee was to relate to a colleague, people would ask: “What would Tom say?” and people would respond in unison, “Always tell the truth.”

Way more than enough has been written about the Tiger Woods episode of late, but it’s one more reminder that in good and bad times, always tell the truth and do it damned fast. There is little if anything to be gained by dragging out a response. If you’ve got to get the lawyers involved do it only with the PR people sitting with the lawyers as equals at the table. Decide fast and get on with it. Opportunity follows speed.