We are a tribal species.  Our daily closest contacts spread out from our families to the streets around our houses, to the cities and towns we live in.

From there, as our children go to school, we build allegiances with the high school, perhaps even a local college, attending and supporting events.  If your city is big enough, you may have a major league sports team, and many of us get rabid about how they perform.

When we support a team, organization or community, our feelings get reflected in specific ways.  The first step is often buying apparel.

Look around you.  If you live in Green Bay, WI, are you seeing people walking around with Dallas Cowboys jackets or Nebraska Cornhusker hats?  I think not.

No, you’re seeing cheeseheads.  You see a lot of green and gold.  Jackets, golf shirts, tee shirts, hats, bumper stickers and bobbleheads of the Packers are all over the place.  This scene plays out all across the world.

We identify through proximity.  We route for the team, wear their colors and sometimes even feel good or bad depending on how the team does.

What’s intriguing about this process is evolving with your kids as they move through their stages of life, from middle school to high school to college (if they go that route).  A similar syndrome of affiliation takes place.

At each stage, you adopt an identity of aligning yourself with the school and its activities.  It may start with robotics in middle school.  You buy a tee shirt to go with your child to the local or regional competition to see how your team of young scientists stacks up against others in the area.

Though there aren’t any stands set up to cheer, you still find yourself anxious, hoping your middle school wins, because you have blood in the event.  So you think good thoughts about everyone and hope they get to keep moving on to higher level competition.

In high school, the push to get you to buy clothing to identify with kids’ school intensifies.  The purchases support causes (trips, teams, clubs) financially, and give you an added identity as a supporter.  The jacket, tee shirt, hat, blanket, chair or any other visible item is way to “show” school spirit. You believe in the school (and what your kid is doing), so you join the movement.

This continues through their four year evolution.  Freshman year, you may start with band and attend all those events, throwing pot luck parties for the trip to see if the tuba players stack up at the marching competition, and then sophomore year you get, “Eh, I’m quitting band.”  Poof went that investment (time and financial).

This continues through sophomore, junior and senior years, as some things are dropped and others added.  Someone wants you to buy a “cheer” shirt for one special game.  You’re asked to donate for silent auctions.  Monogrammed shirts are offered.  Special parking spaces become available if you give enough money.

Then if they’re off to college, you do it again, hitting the campus bookstore, perusing the clothing, deciding whether to get a bumper sticker to advertise your allegiance.  It’s a strange syndrome because once your kids leave their school, whether it’s going from 8th grade to 9th or from 12th grade into college, you are done with all those purchases that identified you as a visible supporter.

After college, you can get back to being just you.  Your closet is probably full of stuff that slowly loses meaning.  So when Goodwill or the Salvation Army calls, you can finally say, “I’m unaligned,” and start to figure out who you are again.

With the constant noise about entrepreneurship, creating new jobs, building technology into business models, it’s easy to miss out on some of the new products and services created under our noses.  We don’t think about them, but we do use them.

Part of the reason we don’t recognize these new businesses is they become ubiquitous without us evening knowing it.  Cell phones?  All of a sudden everybody has one.  Flat screen TVs?  Yeah, they’ve been around for over ten years now, they’re just another big yawn.  iPads?  Shoot, schools are practically mandating them.

I remember back around 2002-2003, sitting with my brothers outside Wrigley Field after a Cubs game, watching the street life.   People were starting to use cell phones more, but I couldn’t tell you what percentage of society actually owned one.

As we sat at an Italian café, munching on a fantastic mix of fresh garlic, parmesan cheese and olive oil mashed into bread, we started looking more closely and it was like ants coming out of their hole after you’ve kicked the sand in their pile.  People were crawling all over the place, and had small, hard plastic devices plastered to their ears and were talking as if an invisible human was next to them.

It was striking.  The tipping point had been reached.  Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was yacking away while they walked down the street, stood on tops of buildings observing the crowd or were sitting like us at the restaurant waiting for our orders.

The phones had been coming for years, but they made a visual debut that day.  We don’t think about what went into the product getting to that point.

Research, product testing, manufacturing, distribution, establishment of wireless networks – all of these things had to occur for the phone to hit the road and reach the masses.  But most of that was done behind the scenes.

We don’t see the research.  We’re not aware of the testing.  We don’t follow the manufacturing process or know what the distribution channels are.  And we don’t even know what a wireless network is, much less how it’s constructed.

All we know is phones started to materialize, and they worked.  The other day in my office a similar situation clobbered me in the face.

A coworker was pulling up images on iStock.  For the uninitiated, iStock has photos on just about any subject you can think of.  You type in some keywords, see what pops up, then purchase an image you like, and you can use it electronically.  Seemingly pretty simple stuff.

But it made me think about all the jobs and companies such a simple concept created.  They need models for the photos since humans are in many shots, so all those people got some form of employment through the iStock model.

Someone has to put the images online.  Some photographer has to take all the pictures. Another person has to reconcile the accounts receivable; bills must be paid.

Sure, some of the positions may be arcane, but something you don’t really think about has spawned this network of jobs in a viable business model in this new world of visual imagery that we inhabit.  It’s wild stuff when you think about it.

How many iStock-type companies are out there?  Who knows?  What I do know is that similar businesses spawn jobs.

New products and services are quietly insinuating themselves into our lives as we share photos, download music or order TV shows online.  Someone is behind the scenes doing “stuff” to make sure they are viable.

I just don’t know what the “stuff” is until I order something. Then it gets interesting to think about.

Your current weather is wrong.  That means whatever was predicted is not happening.  The satellite got it wrong.  The weather person got it wrong.  The software program messed up. The monitoring station blew it.

Everyone and everything conspired so that what you’ve been told or read is not what’s happening directly over your head right now.  This seems to be the case when it comes to predicting rain, at least in Texas.

Here’s what happens:  Because so much of the state is in a drought, you pray for rain daily.   This doesn’t work, so you must rely on the weather report.

You hope it will rain, so maybe wishful thinking makes things screwy.  You over-expect.  You want it to rain, so when you look at the satellite shot on the Internet that shows red thunderstorms and solid green patches for 30 miles north-south and east-west, that you expect it must rain soon where you sit.

Instead, you look at the window, watch and wait.  Then you go back to the computer, look on the weather channel again, and find that the huge swath of rain has passed your house by, with not a rain drop touching your roof.

It’s easy to get irritated with the people who give the weather forecast on TV, because they are tangible and actually “tell” you want is supposed to be like outside. It’s not like we can’t go out and look for ourselves and see what direction the wind is blowing, what the clouds look like and feel the humidity (or lack of moisture) in the air.

Most of us choose to listen to the talking head weather person.  As more and more we go to our personal communication devices to check on everything from movie reviews to the availability of a new sneaker at the Nike outlet store, it becomes the place where we pull the weather up.  When we look at mobile weather information online, and it still doesn’t come true, even at the EXACT SECOND they are telling us something is happening in our city, then something feels fundamentally wrong.

There are multiple apps to follow the weather.  You can look at daily predictions, satellite maps, hourly projections, the five-day forecast. Regardless, they frequently prove incorrect or inaccurate.

Recently, I went online on a Saturday morning when it was cloudy out.  I checked “current” and “today” and “tonight” on the weather link.  “Today” said there would be morning rain.  This did not happen.  “Current” said it was raining at my location.  It was not.  “Tonight” said a chance of continued rain.  You can imagine how much I believed that.

Another time, I went to the satellite map.  A raging storm appeared right on top of us.  Did we get any rain?  Nope.

You can  track the storm on the satellite image, so I did that, watching it move across our area, hammering everything in sight over a period of a couple of hours.  Did this actually occur?  It did not.

At some point you stop believing the app, the predictions, the satellite, and instead start questioning who developed the software to do this type of monitoring.  They are probably laughing at all of us, sitting around a pool drinking margaritas and counting their money for creating flawed software.

Rather than writing and inserting code that would actually accurately predict and project weather patterns, images and activity, the software guys chuckled to themselves and said, “Let’s mess everybody up and make the current location five miles away.  That way everyone will get someone else’s weather.”

When you keep being told something and it doesn’t come true, you grow jaded and cynical.  The best way to move forward is to remember “whatever you’ve been told about the weather is wrong.”  Then you’ll be right.

Companies must spend millions researching the taste of the candy they manufacture, the texture, what sells, what doesn’t, why sales start to decline or increase, what to bring to market and what to eliminate.  They have huge staffs to do this.

They perform market research, do taste testing and analyze the statistics.  Markets are segmented.  People are asked for their opinions about why they like a certain candy, what it is that keeps them buying it.

All this comes at a huge cost in terms of research.  There is no perfect system to figure out what is going to sell, and what is going the way of the Tyrannosaurus.  But there are simpler ways to decide what a candy company should eliminate from its product line to make way for something new.

Recently, a good friend and I figured out a fool proof plan that would save the candy behemoths tons of money.  This tactic would provide direct feedback to the companies.  It would demonstrate in a live workplace what people like to consume and what they don’t.

This system is based on what gets eaten from the office candy bowl.  Every workplace environment has at least one person who puts out a regular display of chocolate bars, gummy worms, lifesavers, mints, Skittles or Jolly Ranchers.

The smart person puts out a mix of the above, changes it up from time to time, and monitors human consumption activity.  “Hmmm, all the Heath bars got eaten first.  What the heck is wrong with those watermelon Tootsie Rolls?  No one is eating them.”  And so on.

Observation takes place.  It’s easy to see what people like and what they don’t.

One of the important facets of this type of workplace candy research is that typically you get different types of employees coming by based on age, sex and occupation.  This allows you to extrapolate.

So, if you put out Jolly Ranchers, for example, and the purple ones are ALWAYS the last ones left in the bowl, then the makers of Jolly Ranchers know it is time to jettison purple.  Invent a new flavor.  Phase out the grape.  Put the new one in the bag, and see how that fares the next time the hard candy gets publicly displayed.

This technique works on several levels.  You can, for example, put out a set of candy bars one week, then chewy fruit candy the next, then thin mints.  In this case, rather than seeing what is left in the bowl, you are doing a comparative analysis to see which type of candy takes the longest to disappear.

Do people seem to like chocolate the best and they dry up in two days?  Or is it the thin mints that disappear in a day-and-a-half?  How about the chewy fruit?  Are they still sitting around two weeks later?

Gathering data from the candy deposits yields an incredible amount of exquisite information in a short period of time.  And it’s information that’s demonstrated in a “live” environment, not in a sampling where people know they are being observed.

This is the best way to figure out consumer behavior:  Watch what they consume. 

When it’s clear that white chocolate Kit Kats repeatedly disappear before dark or regular chocolate, why isn’t it marketed more heavily?  When no one eats the grape Jolly Ranchers, why does the company keep churning them out on the assembly lines?

The Presidents of candy companies need to get out of their offices and into the front lines.  Walk the halls.  Check out the bowls of candy.  Observe it from day-to-day and week-to-week. Take notes.  See what the leftovers are.

Then charge forward with some new products.  Eliminate the losers.  Give us something fresh.