Sometimes people ask me what it takes to run a successful business and I, who know only the media business, am always hesitant to reply. What could someone who has "merely" spent the past 25 years exclusively in publishing and broadcasting via radio, TV, print, and, most recently, online possibly tell anyone about the wider world of business - the hurly-burly of globalization, the brouhaha surrounding offshoring, the cut and thrust of M&As, hostile takeovers, poison pills, and platinum parachutes?

And so, instead I talk to them about running. It can't be sheer linguistic happenstance, I tell them, that we speak of "running" a business. Many aspects of running seem to yield insights so plainly useful to anyone engaged in business that it's a wonder (to me) that the Wharton School of Business or Harvard Business School haven't both long ago insisted that their world-class business majors also minor in competitive, long-distance running.

What business could fail to understand the significance of stamina? Or the peril, revealed only later in a race when it's too late, of having neglected to pace yourself at the beginning? How could any biz-whiz fail to appreciate the rich lesson that can be learned in a single afternoon by anyone willing to pull on a pair of running shoes and compare, first hand, accelerating downhill with accelerating uphill?

That last comparison is something that has always preoccupied me. Whether during a morning jog or a full-fledged marathon, it is an easy one to try for yourself. If you accelerate downhill, sure enough you overtake other runners who aren't doing the same; but considering all the energy you are expending, you don't exactly put a million miles between yourself and the rest of the field. Gravity, after all, is in everyone's favor, not only yours.

Now compare this with accelerating uphill. It may require a greater expenditure of energy, and most likely of willpower, but the effect it has on your position in a race is almost always transformational. You don't open up just a gap, you open up a chasm. So the extra cost seems more than comfortably offset by the benefit.

During the current economic cycle in the U.S. - tough, and persistently an uphill struggle - I have kept an eye out for businesses that nonetheless have been accelerating. These are the businesses in which, as a runner myself, I feel fully confident investing. A management team that understands how disproportionately great the impact of accelerating in the bad ("uphill") times can be, is also highly likely to have mastered some of the other tricks of the competitive running trade, such as capacity building, developing stamina, and ensuring equipment is in tip-top shape.

I was recently in New York City and found myself wanting to retrace the last hour of a N.Y. Marathon I ran a couple of years ago in which I failed so miserably to practice what I preach that I was pipped to the Central Park post by no fewer than 15,654 runners - including (the ultimate indignity, causing my four children to disown me) the rapper P. Diddy...by 17 minutes! As I headed uptown, to pick up the trail of the brutal last 7 miles, it all came back to me - how foolishly I'd pushed so hard in the first 13 miles that the second 13 were nothing short of hell on earth.

Second time around, of course, it wasn't hell on earth at all. I was running in the dead of night, in the chill air of a November evening that was perfect for keeping up a brisk pace - in comparison to the freak N.Y. weather of 2003 that saw temperatures on the day of the marathon soar to the high 70s, reducing heat tolerance by several orders of magnitude. More to the point, I'd learned my lesson. In running, as in business, as in life, endurance isn't enough on its own. Nor is perseverance. To perform competitively, and to succeed, what's needed is an acute sense of when it is suitable to push and when not. In a marathon that "when" may be a function of the temperature of the ambient air; in business it may be a function of the temperature of the overall economy or of a particular vertical.

The businesses that are pushing themselves hard now, as I say, are the ones that will win the Race to Greatness in the next economic cycle, which for readers of JDJ will most likely be characterized by "Web 2.0"-like characteristics. Think Google, not Microsoft. Think SalesForce.com, not Siebel/Oracle. Think Jeremy Allaire's Brightcove, not NBC.

These companies have all, remarkably, been accelerating uphill for the last few quarters. Just imagine what kind of speed they're going to be capable of achieving when they hit the flatter road that seems now to be rushing toward us all.