As my friend, the screenwriter Christopher Lofton, describes my early relationship with Cowboy Bob: “He was a teacher who didn’t know what he was teaching and you were a student who didn’t know what you were learning.” But teach and learn we did, and today I gladly share what I learned with my own sons, and with anyone else who’s interested. All you have to do is ask.

Most businesspeople could learn a lot from some time working on a farm like the one where we lived (there are not many of them left any more). No one is more adaptive or more adept at dealing with edge economies than a farmer devising strategies for keeping a family-owned-and-operated farm alive. The variables — markets, weather, cost of raw materials — fluctuate madly. The lessons that come from working with the earth cannot be taught by a mortal animal, and cannot be learned any other way.

The teamwork and resilience required for family farming are matters of survival. You don’t question what needs to be done, you simply do it (though if you’re 12 years old and have been assigned to muck a barn when you want to be watching TV, you might gripe a lot about what needs to be done).

The most important aspect of the whole family farm shebang, was that my mom, Fern, made my father’s performance as local legend, Cowboy Bob, possible. She talked sense to the bankers, kept her six children focused on their schoolwork and their music and their chores, and kept the peace between restless sons and their rambunctious dad. All the while, she showed us how to laugh at life, exposed us to art and language and literature, and demonstrated unfailing grace in the most trying of times. If not for her support, and her abiding tolerance for my father’s schemes and dreams, our family story surely would have been a tragic one, not the happy one we experienced. We may have learned improvisation from my father, but it was my mother who showed us how to change the game.

As many family farmers do, my dad always held some kind of job off the farm to balance the unpredictability of the farm’s revenue. The best of these jobs, it seemed to me at the time, was his position as the southern Indiana sales rep for the Bel-Tone Hearing Aid Company. This came as a relief to me. No longer would my old man be known to my friends as a nutty rehabilitator of castoff horses and dreamer of unlikely dreams, the Don Quixote of Dubois County. Nosirree, he was a guy with a sweet company car, a big yellow Plymouth Fury III, and an office on the town square with his name on its door in gold lettering.

And then one day, just like that, it was all gone. No more company car, no more office on the town square, no more name on the door, and no explanation about what had happened.

Months later, I asked my mom about it. She said that my dad’s boss at Bel-Tone had invited him to the company Christmas party and he had declined because it conflicted with one of my high school basketball games. “If you don’t show up at the party on Friday, you won’t have a job on Monday,” the boss told him.

Without a word, Cowboy Bob handed over the keys to the company car, his hearing test kit and his sales records, walked out of the office with his name on the door in gold lettering, and never looked back. We never heard him say one recriminatory thing about Bel-Tone, the boss or the situation that resulted in the loss of his job. The choice was clear for him. The choice was easy. If asked to choose between business and his family, he was always going to choose family, no questions asked, no hard feelings, and not a second thought about the possible consequences of his actions.

So this is Lesson One, the first lesson about anything, really: Let yourself be guided by love. My father loved his family, loved his ridiculous horses, and thanked God for the life he embraced in a great big bear hug of love. Nothing else was even in the race. Acting on love, doing what you do because of it, is the only way that the pursuit of happiness can be a happy trip. First name your loves. Then go out and prove them to the world.

We got an occasional hint that he’d experienced his share of awfulness. We did not own guns, and we did not allow hunting on our land, anomalies among the farm families from our neck of the woods. My uncle once told me my dad had been in an ambush where only he and another guy in his unit survived. When we balked at eating all the food on our plates, he would sometimes end the dispute by declaring flatly: “You’ve never seen people starving to death.” He was right. We had not. And so we’d soldier on, through the boiled beets or the cauliflower, wondering all the while who he’d seen starving to death, and why.

Late in his life, he opened up a little bit about the war, as if there were things he wanted us to know. He said he had seen a lot of shooting, and had seen a lot of people killed, many by friendly fire discharged in the chaos and confusion of battle. In the wake of the war, he suffered from what today would be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and could not be around crowds or endure loud noises. “You never knew what was going on,” he said of his war experience. And that, to me, remains the enduring impression of what war is: That those doing the actual fighting do not know what’s going on

War is an Industrial Age game played by the powerful at the expense of those whose lives are on the line. We know from the tragic story of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan that those doing the actual fighting still do not know what’s going on.

All of which is why the story of Arzu Rugs caught my my attention last week on the local news in Chicago. Founded by Connie Duckworth, a former Goldman Sachs trader, Arzu imports the beautiful rugs woven by the artisans of Afghanistan. But rugmaking is only the meta layer of a game with much deeper meaning, and many other objectives.

Arzu’s work embroiders art and commercialism with social consciousness. Before they can sign a contract with Arzu, weavers are required to take courses in literacy, math, health, hygiene, nutrition and human rights. Arzu has championed women’s rights, piloted community sports programs, built catchbasins to provide villages with healthy drinking water, and given educations to the children of hundreds of Afghan families.

In the Afghan language of Daria, ‘arzu’ means hope.

In the Networked World, we have the ability to play games that are more productive than the one that truamatized my father and killed Pat Tillman. Games initiated by the powerful for the benefit of all who play them, where all the players know what’s going on. Games that out-smart our enemies instead of trying to out-kill them, that feed people instead of starving them. Games in which friendly fire means stoking the hope that burns in every parent for every child.

And while I question how strong one actually has to be while going to college in San Diego and living in a place with your buds down on Pacific Beach…

It does not detract from the wisdom of the advice. My father, the single best improviser I’ve ever known, had a way of boiling things down to their essence. He was a teacher who often had no idea what he was teaching. He was just living his life, going about his business, sharing what he discovered along the way. And one of the things he shared to great effect was the idea of being strong — in character, in focus, in action — in everything you do.

Which is why, in studying improv at I. O. West, when the teachers would stress the importance of making strong choices, there was a sense of deja vu about it all. Aha, right! I knew this, sure I did.

My father: When you dig a post hole, dig the living daylights out of it. Give me that post hole digger and let me show you how. (Cue violent attack on earth with hand digger by man wearing straw cowboy hat.)

My improv teachers: If your group is playing the teeth in someone’s mouth, and you are a molar, show us your molar-ness! Grind! Ache! Masticate! Get pulled! Vote in elections!

Which brings us to…

GameChangers: When doing business in the Networked World, you have to make strong choices. Why? Because if you don’t, nothing else matters. Because the game will pass you by.

Characteristics of strong choices: They are made on instinct informed by knowledge. They can often arise from, or be accompanied by movement (e.g. getting on a plane, running up the stairs, making an investment, digging a post hole). They deal in emotional truths, not just cosmetic ones. Strong choices bring new and useful information to your scenes. Supporting your scene partners and giving them opportunities to shine is one of the strongest choices any improviser can make. (Note that ’strong,’ in the parlance of improvisation, does not mean the same thing as ‘dominant.’ Dominating a scene and your scene partners with the choices you make is not a sign of strength. It is a show of ego.)

Strong choices bring ultra-clear direction to your scenes and focus to your team. They demonstrate commitment to the brand, the cause, the organization. And whether you’re a bedouin or a webpreneur, you know that there’s too much data in the datastream for you to just daintily stick a toe in and take the temperature. If you do that, the opportunity or anomaly (leading to opportunity) you spot out there in the datastream will go sailing past and you’ll never catch up with it. You gotta jump into a scene like a base jumper going off the Tokyo Tower. If you don’t go when you get the chance, Security will tase you, bro.

All this contrasts with the more deliberate, machine-like behaviors of the Industrial Age, when wealth moved in sync with the physical activities of workers and manufacturing. With factories up and running, no one had to make strong choices. They didn’t have to make choices at all. Why bother? You could only get the smelters to smelt so much steel in a day. Workers became human lubricants in the gears of industry. Frictionless behaviors became the norm. Strong choices were dangerous, they could throw a monkey wrench into the whole works. Better to have a nice big fat lunch and a martini or two instead.

Today, wealth has the potential to move, sometimes recklessly, at the speed of thought. However fast wealth moves in your particular industry, it has definitely become unhinged in time from the physical realm. My money gets into Amazon’s account way before my merch arrives. Sometimes, unfortunately, a monkey wrench in the works can seem like the only option for slowing things down. But there’s good news for GameChangers: One of the singular benefits of improvisation is that it, too, moves at the speed of thought. Improvisation is the only business discipline that can keep up with the datastream!

Social networking creates opportunities for strong choices, for letting your fellow players know where you stand. So take it upon yourself to be like Nick O’Neill, whose self-funded, soon-to-launch new venture, Social Times, I just happened to link to today — and now my trademark lawyer will be attending his launch party in D.C. and the network will extend, and new wealth will surely ensue. It happens just like that when you make strong choices. They have a magnetic effect on your audience, including those who will someday become your customers.

Oh, and just for the record, I think my both my sons — and all my father’s grandchildren — will take his advice to heart, and be strong, and prepared for anything that may come their way. I am very excited about the possibilities presented by the Networked World, partly because I know they are, too.