I’ve been known to be a tough director when it comes to creative planning and development. But I’m far from an evil dictator, mind you – my powers have always been used for good. A student of traditional creative/agency environments in the early 90s, I developed my skills and outlook among policies that emphasized initiative and discipline BEFORE "cool" and "being nice." Seventeen years after I began, I have not changed. Not very PC of me. But I cannot help myself. Witnessing the birth of interactive media followed by the displacement of countless talented creatives due to the dot-com bomb and now our latest "marketing" recession, I would argue that the soft shop talk just isn’t getting the job done. It seems that when the going gets tough, the tough gets more passive than ever these days. Generations of young creatives have been lost in the wake of that passivity with no leadership to guide them to shore. Turns my gut. Instead of facing new technology and future communication challenges and working together to figure things out as once was done in the past, many are still fragmented and losing sight of what makes them "creative" to begin with. LIKE IT OR NOT, emerging media will define our roles. Adaptation is the nature of our industry and part of being a creative. It happened with the web and it will happen again with social and mobile.  So here are some creative brain bits that might bite until you start feeling juices flowing...again. Only the blind follow the blind. Marketing brand experts are still getting their heads around social media's impact on audiences. Waiting for them to show you the ropes is a career death sentence. Try brainstorming how current campaigns could naturally stem into community building/on-the-go experiences. Share your ideas with others outside your department, including clients and stress-test concepts. Even if they don't take hold, you are setting the groundwork for the "new." What is old is new again. New mobile media/3G means limited bandwidths and slow connectivity for a while. Limits mean it’s back to modular, optimized creative design. So blow the dust off of past practices and re-outfit them for the future. Have lunch and learn with more "seasoned" designers demonstrating tricks of the old trades for the young to explore and refine moving forward. Time to play leap frog. E-commerce adoption took five years. Facebook required two years before it really took off. Twitter grabbed a hold of daily life in fewer than six months. Businesses will be jumping ahead to catch up to the frantic pace of technology. They’ll expect you to be ready too. Do yourself a favor and check out webcasts on the latest and greatest. Assign different topics to your team, and show-and-tell big time. In the past, keeping your head low during crazy times was a good survival tactic until things calmed down. Today, not so much. You need wide-open eyes to face the fast-approaching media tsunami and risk being bit by the inspiration bug. Heaven forbid!