Earlier this week, the Pentagon released portions of its first formal cyber strategy and announced that it might respond to cyber attacks with traditional military force. As an unidentified U.S. military official told The Wall Street Journal, "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks." This is serious stuff.

Last week must have touched a nerve. My last column was about solution selling and how salespeople can benefit from a "listen first, speak second" model. The Spin Board may not have lit up, but my inbox certainly did, as I received a number of direct emails from people who either agreed with me, or thought I was a moron for wasting their time restating the obvious.

The world is not short on ideas. However, walking the talk and playing your role in facilitating the execution of ideas and helping to move a project or a business from point A to point B is harder to do. Those who understand the logistical realities of what it takes to execute strategies make the best strategists. Those who drive innovation not out of an indiscriminate desire to innovate, but ultimately as a creative and practical solution to meet an objective, become the best project leaders. These individuals get the job done and inspire others around them. Does your agency …

This past Saturday, we ran a TEDx event in my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, focused on the future of the city post-quake. Seventeen speakers, ranging from local urban planners to Art Agnos, the former Mayor of San Francisco during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, gathered before a sell-out crowd of 700 to share their visions for Christchurch, to explore the possibilities before us, and to inspire us to emerge from the disaster better, stronger, safer, and more beautiful than before.

"Do no harm." That was blogger Jeff Jarvis's challenge to French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the e-G8 in Paris this week. Borrowing from the Hippocratic Oath and cautioning against Internet regulation, Jeff's exchange with the president helped set the stage for two days of robust, frank, sometimes heated, but always civil discussions on what the G8 leaders should do -- or not do -- relative to the Internet Revolution.

There are many kinds of salespeople in marketing. Some are more successful than others, but in my mind the most successful ones are what many refer to as the "solution sellers." Solution selling is an art and a science that revolves around a simple practice: listen first and sell second.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you are well aware of the growing skew towards math and science in the digital media industry. We are operating in the age of the algorithm. So let's put digital marketing technology algorithms into context.

The digital media arena -- the environment in which we sell, plan, buy, measure, optimize and account for media -- is bloody complicated right now. Yes, it's dynamic. New entities are in play. New currencies are flowing. Data drives. The economics are in flux. Talent is retooling itself (or being retooled). Companies are transforming themselves to participate in all the hoopla of an increasingly automated media landscape -- a la bidded media. But, never before in our industry has the "buy/sell" meant so much and had to carry so much water.

One-to-one marketing doesn't work, and we should probably stop pretending that it does. The fallacy of one-to-one marketing is that a brand can speak directly to a consumer in a targeted, efficient manner, and be successful. The fact is, you can't. You cannot be efficient talking to a target of one. What is true is that community marketing works, and leveraging your community to evangelize your brand is an effective, efficient model, which has been proven in this age of social media.

Last week we discussed the top three ways that agencies can improve the client/agency relationship. Of course there are two parties to every relationship, and this week we delve into what clients can do to improve relationships with their agencies.