As a leader, one of your top priorities is to clearly communicate your expectations to your team. This includes your expectations for how they perform their work, your expectations for the results they achieve, and your expectations for how they treat people.

It takes what feels like over-communication to maintain clarity with your team. Don’t assume expectations are clear because you’ve said enough to feel like you are restating the obvious.

Try this. Ask your team members to tell you in their own words what your key expectations of them are. The first time I did that I was surprised to find out how much had been lost in translation. I thought I’d been over-communicating. I was wrong.

Make sure your team members are clear on your expectations for their actions and results. This is one of the pillars of a high-performing team, and it’s the leader’s responsibility.

Marketing and sales used to be about correctly guessing what type of customer was most likely to buy what you were selling, and interrupting them with an advertisement in their favorite magazine, or maybe a phone call. You had a chance to talk to them before they made a buying decision.

The Internet has empowered media consumers with a large number of choices, including ad-free or ad-skippable choices. The days of effectively interrupting your target market while they read, listen, or watch are all but over.

The Internet has also empowered consumers to look for what they want, when they want it, at the price they want to pay. This is even more important than the changes in media consumption. Modern businesses often don’t get to interact with the potential customers at all until after they’ve made a purchase decision.

People increasingly shop online for everything from routine purchases like insurance, to big things like cars and houses. By the time I call a salesperson I often know exactly what I want to pay for. The company I didn’t choose won’t even know I was looking.

The job of most modern marketers is to do the work in advance to be found and be chosen. This means appear in search results and other places customers are looking, and prepare a web site, pricing, and product offering that fit what the customers want. You don’t find them, they find you.

I never want to stop stretching and putting more of my potential to use. Courage and stewardship of my resources say it’s time for me to expand beyond the businesses I started.

I’m looking for businesses to buy and investments to make. I’m happy to consider a broad range from down to earth businesses to unique or unusual opportunities.

If you know of a business for sale, or someone who needs capital to start or grow their business, please put me in touch with them. I’d be very grateful.

Many of you in developed economies, like the United States, recognize that you have more stuff and money than you need, and you have more stuff and money than most people in the rest of the world have.

When recognizing this, it’s natural to want to even things up by giving things away to people who have less. Though this is often well-intentioned, it is also often a disservice to the recipient. It’s similar, by analogy, to someone who knows a lot about math seeing a struggling math student and evening things up by giving them the answers to their homework. It’s not what that math student needs, or really wants deep down. Human beings want to feel capable. They want to succeed on their merit.

(There are also emergencies, like natural disasters and war, or a child wandering toward the street. These require a different response entirely, the giving of emergency aide.)

I’ve been working on my book about the investment of time and money. I’m writing chapters about consumption and savings, compounding growth, and investing for the long term.

Putting these two ideas together, I think one of the best things we rich Americans can do with our excess is not consume it, but save it and invest it in increases in productivity. Things like our skills, our education, our business activities that spill over into creating opportunities for others to learn, grow, and work. It means courage to invest in ourselves, to start things, to lead things, and to invite others into those things.

There’s little long-term benefit in consuming more ourselves, and little long-term benefit in transferring stuff from the haves to the have-nots. There’s great long-term benefit in increasing productivity and broadening the circles of those who are welcomed to participate in it.

This requires risk and investment, and those are things we can do with our excess.

At it’s core Christmas is about generosity. The generosity of a God who gave up a son for our benefit, reflected in our generosity with each other at Christmas.

Generosity gives life meaning more than anything else I know. Have a generous Christmas Day.