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People who quit their jobs with flair are the new folk heroes. The overwhelming public support for both the JetBlue flight attendant and the young woman (Jenny with no last name) who supposedly quit her brokerage job with a series of bold messages on a dry-erase board is a not-to-be-ignored sign that the wind is beginning to shift direction.

A year ago, the employee trend was to put up with anything,  just to keep a job. Companies were undergoing massive layoffs, freezing salary increases and eliminating employer funding of 401(k)s, all with little complaint from the employees who managed to remain on the payroll. The CEO of a global consumer goods company we were pitching, when asked if he were concerned about low employee morale, replied, “Where else are they going to work?”

They’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. It doesn’t matter what made airline attendant Steven Slater crack or whether Jenny the HOPA was a hoax. What’s noteworthy is the way the American public has responded with such fervor.

This is a signal to the corporate employers who are paying attention. The economy will improve, sooner or later. Meanwhile, Boomers are retiring, and the Gen X generation following on their heels is not large enough to fill all the positions they’ll leave behind. It won’t be long until the tables are turned in the workplace and the jobs outnumber the people available to fill them.

The companies that will win star talent in the coming competition will be the ones able to create high employee engagement. Does your company have a clear vision at the top? Is that vision communicated to and embraced by employees? Do you have a strong corporate culture that makes the company a good place to work? Have you actually managed to turn rank-and-file employees into brand ambassadors? Otherwise, you’ll need to keep a close eye on those emergency chutes. Not to mention the beer.

Sometimes what you need to maintain work-life balance is to make a trade-off between two different kinds of work. My posts here on this blog have slowed considerably since sometime before Christmas. I went from averaging three posts a week to something like one a week — or less.

The thing is, I started a novel over the Christmas break. I wrote 12 and 14 hours a day, slipping it in between Santa Claus duty and cooking for our annual New Year’s hoppinjohn party. When I went back to the office after the holidays, I began working on the book in the early  mornings before work and on weekends. Which is exactly when I used to work on my blog.

Whenever you take on another work commitment, you might want to think about what you’re NOT going to do to make time for the new priority. That’s easier said than done. Usually those new commitments sneak up on you as a new client assignment, a special request from your boss, or an irresistible opportunity for advancement, recognition or visibility. They’re generally not the kinds of things you want to turn down. In an ideal world, you’ve got the capacity to take on more.

But if your plate is already full, you can’t keep piling on more and more without dropping something. Most of us have figured out by now that we can more consistently perform at higher levels when we avoid letting ourselves get completely exhausted. Also that reaching absolute exhaustion requires an inconvenient recovery time when we’re just not our sharpest.

Like they say, we all get the same number of hours in the day. Einstein didn’t get more than 24 of them, and neither does President Obama. Come to think of it, you can fit a lot into 24 hours. Most days, I feel like I have a fairly balanced life. But it stays that way only if I say no to some things, or at least put them on hold for a time while something else takes that priority spot.

Have you had to make choices in what work you can take on when? I’d love to hear what other people have experienced with work-work balance. Or if you tend to just take that extra work time out of your personal life hours.

For companies both large and small, flexibility is the holy grail of employee benefits. The good news for employers stymied by the Recession, and not in the position to be giving out raises and bonuses, is that offering flexibility can trump financial benefits – or the lack thereof.

Tribe’s recent research with New Generation employees indicates that the younger employees may expect flexibility even more than their Boomer colleagues. Although a story on NPR this morning pointed out that the employees who need flexibility most are the low-wage workers, a disproportionate number of which are single moms.

A family-care focus is a common theme among the companies listed on Fortune’s latest list of Best Companies To Work For. “They don’t just take care of the employee, they take care of their whole families,” said my colleague Jennifer Bull in her Good Company Blog.

One of the things families need most is flexibility. Jennifer Ludden, the NPR correspondent responsible for the piece I heard this morning, describes one example of family-friendly flexibility on the part of Family Fare grocery near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tina Burgess, mother of two boys, had been a part-time employee at the grocery for years when she was offered a full-time position.

“Burgess wanted the benefits that came with that job, but there was a problem: it started at 5 a.m. Her husband left for work at 5:30, so Burgess needed to be home to get her children to school. Her manager worked it out.”

Burgess goes into work at 5, but calls her teenage sons at 7 to wake them up. (The boys sleep with their cell phones on their pillows.) She then takes her 30-minute lunch break at 7:15 in the morning, to drive home, pack lunches, and get her kids out the door to school. Although the boys are old enough that they might be able to handle the morning routine on their own, Burgess feels strongly about being there.

“’Sometimes in the morning, I get a feel for if it’s going to be a bad day,’ she says. ‘Maybe they want to say something before they go to school. If I wasn’t there, they wouldn’t be able to.’”

What’s more, offering flexibility could make your employees healthier and contribute to the bottom line of the company’s profitability. Ludden cites a recent NIH study on the correlation between job flexibility and employee health, indicating that those employees with more flexible management had both better physical health reports and higher job satisfaction.

The best news for employers? Flexibility is cheap. Even with hourly workers, there are ways to accommodate employees’ family responsibilities, from allowing workers to trade shifts to giving them five minutes to call home to make sure the kids got home from school okay. As we come out of the recession, and the competition for workers heats up again, you can bet flexibility will remain one of the best ways to both recruit and retain talent.

Have you seen these Christmas elves? I think the Magic Elf craze originated in the Southeast several years ago, but has grown in popularity and geography since. They’re sort of rag-doll like elves that visit each year during the holiday season and play pranks each night until Christmas Eve, when they return to the North Pole with Santa.

My son’s elf is named Cameron. A friend of his got an elf named Mansfield. My nieces’ elves are Colette and Megan. Some kids from our church have an elf that arrived with the unfortunate name of Enus. Each elf has his or her own personality, and the kids’ bound out of bed each morning to see what those nutty elves have been up to while the rest of the house was asleep.

That’s all very magical for the kids, but for the parents, it’s hard work. Night after night, you have to come up with trick after trick after trick. Often, I find myself heading upstairs for bed when I suddenly remember I haven’t done the elf. My sister has been known to pitch hers out the back door when she’s particularly tired, and then tell the girls the next morning that the elves must have wanted to play in the backyard. Wouldn’t it make things easier if parents had a whole bunch of tricks all figured out ahead of time?

Today we launched an e-book called “50 Elf Tricks: The Busy Parent’s Shortcut to Christmas Elf Magic.” Actually, Tribe is not really in the business of creating content for kids; Most of our clients are more the Fortune 500-type. But we have a policy of looking for where we can help, and this seemed, in its own small way, like something we could do to help.

Each of the 50 tricks includes a rhyming note for the elf to sign, explaining his or her tricks that range from leaving a trail of baby carrots to lure reindeer inside to a special shaving cream message written in shaving cream on the bathroom mirror. There are quick and easy tricks for nights when parents are particularly exhausted and more meaningful tricks that encourage the spirit of giving — or even good habits, like teeth brushing.

The e-book is $9.95 at the site we created for it (www.elfideas.com) and 50% goes to Santa. We’ll be able to donate half of each purchase price to the Emmaus House Christmas program, where Santa Claus will hand out gifts to over 700 kids who otherwise might not have much magic in their holiday.

This is one of the things I love most about owning a small company. You can think something up and make it happen. I had the idea driving home last Tuesday and a week later, the e-book is written and art directed and for sale on the worldwide web. So fast, it can be almost like having elves at work during the night.

There’s nothing like sorting through the mail and finding an unexpected check. Twice a year, in October and in March, I find a 9″ x 12″ envelope in the mailbox from Andrews-McMeel Publishing. Inside is the sales statement for the last six months for  a little book called “Beach Wisdom: Life Lessons from the Ocean,” — and the prize inside — a royalty check.

I got the idea for Beach Wisdom sitting on the beach drinking beer with some girlfriends. I scribbled some notes down in my ever-present spiral notebook, probably without any discernible break in the conversation. There was nothing particularly earth shaking about it.

At the time, I was casting about for ways to make money from writing that didn’t depend on billable hours. In advertising, you generally are paid for the hours it takes to complete a project. In publishing, I realized, there was the potential for doing the work once, and then getting paid for that same work, over and over again. I did some research and discovered that gift books, those little books you see at the register, with tasty looking covers and lots of pictures inside, represented the fastest growing segment of the industry, and that Andrews McMeel was by far the biggest fish in that pond.

Thus began our kitchen table book meetings. I had talked an old friend, my former art director partner at another ad agency, into teaming up, and we’d meet one morning a week and hash out ideas for gift books. Finally, we submitted ten book ideas, “Beach Wisdom,” being one of them, to Andrews-McMeel.

Initially, they were interested in four or five of the ideas, and finally offered us publishing contracts and advance royalty payments for two: “Beach Wisdom” and “Tiny Monsters,” which was a collection of black and white photos of kids in costume with funny lines for each one.

Tiny Monsters died an early death. It never sold enough for us to earn out our advance. (Although the cool thing about publishing is that you get to keep your full advance even if the book bombs.)

I’ve published two more books since those first two. On each of the last two books, I lavished tons of money and time and energy promoting and publicizing. For “How to Run Your Business Like a Girl,” I spent about a year doing book signings, press kits, media interviews and speaking engagements. I was online, I was in print, I was on the radio and even on TV a couple of times. For “Hell Yes! Two Little Words for a Simpler, Happier Life,” I again hired a publicist, produced press kits and tip sheets and all sorts of promotional materials, blogged about it, asked  other bloggers to blog about it, even asked my FaceBook buddies to help promote it.

Neither of those other two books will ever make a dime beyond my advance. It’s not the fault of the books. Either one of them is a stronger book, in my opinion, than “Beach Wisdom.”  It’s not the fault of the promotion. We did a gracious plenty to get those books off the ground. Both received some great reviews and nice media attention.

You just never know what’s going to pop. For some reason, “Beach Wisdom” continues to sell when the others have not enjoyed the same shelf life. “Beach Wisdom” has now sold over 30,000 copies — compared to something under 10,000 for the others. Who knew?

The lesson here is to keep offering the world all your best ideas. The more ideas you can bring to life, the better the chance you have of one of them becoming the thing that pops. And when one of your favorite projects doesn’t take root the way you’d hoped, don’t take it too personally. Just keep those new ideas coming.

Most people with a runaway bestseller — or the hottest iPhone app, or the startup that becomes an Amazon or a Starbucks — have also had plenty of ideas that never caught fire, and others that never may have sparked but never burst into flame.  It’s impossible to know ahead of time.

Regardless, getting paid over and over again for something you did years ago never gets old. It’s always a nice surprise to get that check. Makes me want to celebrate with a beer on the beach.

Even if you have fabulous office space and enjoy going in every morning to be surrounded by your crackerjack staff, it’s not a bad idea to maintain a functional home office as well. I worked from a home office for the first several years after starting Tribe, and learned this week how lucky I was that I kept it largely intact after we leased real office space.

I’ve spent this week in that home office, thanks to the swine flu. I came down with it Monday night, my fever broke Tuesday night, and I thought staying out of the office for 24 hours after my temperature returned to normal would be a gracious plenty of time to stay away.

However, my entire staff voted to keep me home for the rest of the week, and then assigned my business partner the task of talking me into that. Nobody wants to catch H1N1. We also have two pregnant employees. One of them went in for her weekly check up and when she mentioned that her boss had the swine flu, the doctor went ape. Apparently, pregnant women are at elevated risk for complications with this virus.

So I set up shop in my old home office, where the wireless still works, the printer still works, my cell phone gets a good signal and the coffee machine is just a few steps away. I opened up all the windows, let the dog settle in at my feet and then I got down to business. I’ve kept up with the constant flurry of email. I’ve worked undisturbed for long stretches. And when I needed to touch base on projects with people in the office, we did it by phone or iChat.

Yesterday was such a gorgeous sunny fall day that I spent the afternoon on the deck with my laptop. I could hear the birds singing, feel the breeze in the trees, enjoy the rich colors of the potted mums waiting to be planted. Midway through, I took a break to walk up to the school to collect our fourth grader. Sam started in on homework and I got back to my work. Later, I could see him out of the corner of my eye on his homemade bag swing, figuring out ways to use a ladder to make the swing go higher and further. Once in awhile, I’d respond to a “Mama, watch this” request.

It’s a nice way to work. I might miss my home office on Monday.

“My business seems to be successful,” said the new entrepreneur, “but when do I get to quit worrying about enough work coming in?” Jo Ann is an accomplished marketer, with 20 years of experience under her belt and an MBA, not to mention gorgeous and personable. She left her post as VP/CMO at a venerable brand to start her own marketing consultancy.

“Never,” was all I could tell her. In my years of running my own companies, I’ve been able to come to a strange peace with that fact, but some days it requires a certain amount of zen not to completely freak out.

I gave her my rock climbing metaphor. When I was just starting my first ad agency, I  asked that same question of my friend Bill, a wildly successful illustrator who has run his own business for decades. Bill’s personality is about as low stress as mine is high, and I would never peg him for a worrier. (One night at some industry event, I remarked to Bill that it had been a gorgeous afternoon. He agreed, and revealed that he’d turned down a job to do a Newsweek cover that afternoon so he could go hiking instead. I was impressed, but he laughed and said, “I’m thinking I made the wrong decision.”) Bill told me the same thing I told Jo Ann: never.

Bill said he still worries all the time, but he doesn’t view worry as a negative. He suggested I try to enjoy the fear, the same way I enjoy the fear inherent to rock climbing. “Think of it as exciting,” he said. “It’s scary, but it’s kind of fun.”

Here are my four best tips for maintaining perspective:

1. Redefine worry. Worry can be useful, if it wakes you up in the middle of the night with the realization that you won’t be able to make payroll unless you collect that big receivable that’s running late. Worry can make you get up the next morning and get your client on the phone to help push that invoice through their accounting department and get you a check. Instead of telling yourself that you’re worried, maybe you’re actually just “aware.”

2. Remember how much is in your control. Although you can’t control the economy or a potential client’s budget cuts, you can control your efforts. During slow times, ramp up your networking, your outreach, your marketing. In your own business, you truly have more control over your success than you would working for a large company.

3. Give seeds time to grow. For the sort of professional services many small businesses are selling, the sales process can stretch out for years. If you don’t get a piece of business you pitch today, that doesn’t mean you won’t win some work from that client somewhere down the road. At Tribe, we got our first project from UPS a full two years after I’d sent an introductory letter to a heavyweight there. He’d kept that letter in his files until he had a need for us. Similar story with our Chick-fil-A clients. Life is long.

4. Don’t slack off in good times. When a small business is busy, it’s usually all hands on deck to get the work done. It’s very difficult to come up for air long enough to formulate any sort of marketing efforts. Just don’t let your business development machine grind to a complete halt. Keep pitching. Stay visible. Be in touch.

I’m sure some of you out there have tips to add to that list. How do you deal with the relentless need to keep drumming up business?

The front page of the New York Times yesterday carried an article on women balancing military duty and family. The military seems to have adapted fairly well to women serving alongside men, just as the workplace has over the past several decades. “Motherhood, though,” says the writer of the article, Lizette Alvarez, “poses a more formidable challenge for the armed forces.”

The corporate world is also still struggling with how to accommodate motherhood. The difficulties presented by that dual life — corporate gig and loving mom — are one reason so many women start their own companies before they work their way up to that corner office.

“Hanging on to today’s war-savvy, battle-tested cadre of mothers — and would-be mothers — is both crucial and difficult for the Army, say officers, enlistees and experts. ‘The Army’s challenge, but also the military’s challenge, is to help service members feel they don’t have to choose between family life and their military career,’ said Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University, an organization supported in part by the Department of Defense.”

“’They leave when they can’t figure out’ a way to do both, she said.” Just as many mothers leave their corporate positions when they can’t reconcile the demands of their work calendar with their kid’s schedules.

Running their own businesses allows mothers the freedom to control their own calendars. Being able to schedule business trips so they don’t interfere with kids’ birthdays and school plays, to set client meetings at a time that will still get you to soccer practice by pickup, can make all the difference. It’s one of the chief advantages of entrepreneurship, especially for parents.

Most mothers I know who’ve started a company aren’t really looking for a way to work less hard. Entrepreneurs of every stripe work hard. They’re attracted to entrepreneurship partly because it allows them to work on their own terms  – and around their kids’ routines. They might put in a few hours before the kids wake up and break to get them breakfast and off to the school bus. They might field phone calls on their cell while driving a backseat of ballerinas to dance class. Or take the afternoon to oversee homework and fix dinner, but spend a productive few hours on the computer after the kids are in bed.

Starting a business is also a way women can have it both ways. They can manage the needs of their children, but not miss the excitement and satisfaction of doing work they love and are good at. Those two driving forces are much more difficult to reconcile when the place you work is a war zone.

“Not long after reuniting with her children in 2005, Specialist Holschlag said, she was sitting alone in her apartment in Iowa when she was struck by a thought she recognized as absurdly selfish: she wanted to go back to Iraq.”

Maggie would really rather be at home with her new baby, but went back to her job after a standard maternity leave because she and her husband decided they couldn’t afford for her not to work. Several months into it, she’s figured out that after paying for childcare and other expenses associated with the job, she nets about $300 a month. So, in her words, she’s working “to pay for a couple of tanks of gas and some groceries.”

Is there not a better way to make $300? Maggie is the sister of a friend of mine, and I’ve only met her once or twice, but I can’t quit thinking about her situation. I remember what it was like to have a new baby and be torn away by work. And I loved my work at the time, although I understand Maggie is not crazy about her job. I do know she comes from an entrepreneurial family, so the idea of starting her own business is probably not foreign to her.

What sort of business could she start that would mean limited time away from her baby? We’re not talking about the kind of all-consuming startup that requires 80 hours a week or depends on venture capital to get off the ground. To quit her job, Maggie would only need to create $3,600 a year in net profit. That’s not so hard to do. Let’s look at some hypothetical possibilities, making some huge assumptions about what sorts of skills and talents she might have to offer — and the kinds of things she’d actually enjoy doing.

A good solution would be something she could bill by the hour, for only a handful of hours a week. Let’s say she’s a talented tennis player and could give tennis lessons, or fluent in French and could tutor high school students, or a math whiz and could serve as an SAT coach for kids trying to raise their scores. If she charged $50 an hour, or even $35, she could work a very short week and clear her $300 net, even if she had to pay a babysitter. Although, she also might schedule some of those hours during the weekends when her husband could be with the baby.

Let’s say she’s been keeping the company books on Quickbooks at her current job. So many small businesses use that accounting software, many of which might not be large enough to have a full-time bookkeeper but would like to outsource the accounts payable, accounts receivable and basic financial reports. She could handle the books for one or two small companies by going in just a morning or so a week and come home with that $300 or more.

What about starting a company that would provide something needed by other mothers with young kids? I remember several years ago a  woman in New York had the brilliant idea of an exercise class in Central Park that incorporated baby strollers (and babies) into the fitness routine. Maybe Maggie was a lifeguard and swim instructor in her youth and could start a group swimming class for mothers and babies using her mom’s backyard pool.

One trick to making this plan work would be choosing a business that offers the chance of recurring income from the same clients month after month. In other words, she signs up one student for tennis lessons and sees them once a week for months on end. Or connects with a small business who could use a freelance bookkeeper and continues to do their books until they’re large enough to need someone full time. Otherwise, she’ll need to spend a large amount of her time marketing her services so she can create new clients over and over.

Selling your hours adds up more quickly than selling a thing. Particularly a thing that requires hard costs for materials or equipment.  This is not always true, but I think would be for the types of things I can imagine someone like Maggie selling, like homemade greeting cards (she’s very crafty) or hand sewn baby bonnets or fresh-baked birthday cakes. She would have to sell a whole bunch of any of those to make her $300 each month. If you have a skill or talent that allows you to charge a significant hourly rate, that can be an easier path to doing without a paycheck.

Starting a company as a mompreneur doesn’t have to be complicated. If you don’t need to rent office space or hire employees or buy expensive equipment, the startup doesn’t have to cost much either. This is not meant to be a pushy plug for our products, but the Start Your Own Company application for the iPhone is just .99 and could walk Maggie through the basic steps of launching a business. Or she could try the more comprehensive Start Your Own Company printed deck from Starter Cards, which also includes information on the Launch and Follow-Through phases as well as the Launch phase. Either one could be a simple first step to creating a life-sized business that works for this stage of her life.

It’s hard for entrepreneurs to take a break. For one thing, we tend to be excited about our work, so it’s not like we hate going into the office. For another, when we’re rolling ahead with some real momentum, it’s hard to even see that we could benefit from some stillness.

But some of the best ideas come when you slow down. Even if you have to force yourself to quit moving so fast.

I’m in Arizona today, where I try to come three or four times a year to get still. It takes a few days to shift gears. At first I’m a little edgy and unsettled, but after some hiking and other outdoor exercise in the desert heat, a few massages and some time by the pool, I can feel clarity begin to settle around me. 

I wake up early and sit on my terrace with coffee to watch the sky behind the Santa Catalina mountains turn from black to blue. I scribble thoughts and notes in my spiral notebook, and suddenly I find new ideas crystallizing. Often, these ideas or realizations seem obvious in retrospect, but when I was back in the office moving a mile a minute, I just couldn’t see them.

This is where I’ve experienced some of the most pivotal moments in my business. It’s where I’ve had the  ideas for a book or two; where it’s suddenly hit me that it was time for Tribe to shift direction or even reinvent;  where I realized it was time to move from a virtual office to a real one, so we could have everyone at Tribe within the same four walls.

It’s also where I’m reminded, over and over again, that sometimes the best office is the one without four walls.