I love the Post Office. I still get excited when I a piece of personal mail. And I bet you do too. Even though we complain about it we still like the service the Post Office delivers. It's easy to critique a government agency that's operates so publicly. Considering what they accomplish every day it's amazing it works so well.

But there's a missing piece that the leadership of the Postal Service left out. For too long the Postal Service has focused more on operations instead of innovation. In today's electronic world they are no longer competing with FEDEX and UPS. The real competitors are Facebook, Twitter, Text, and Google. The other companies that connect people.

People love new and the new USPS competitors are all about what's next. Every day there's some innovation announced by the Facebooks of the world and many of them lead to better connection.

The news coming out of the post office is mostly bad and they are trying to cut their way to profitability. I say innovate your way out of this mess.

Be like the internet and deliver 24/7 all the time and anywhere. Now it's easy to do and many companies with much fewer resources are doing it. Twitter is just four years old. It may seem counter intuitive to be like the competitors, but that's what's necessary now.

Younger people may not adopt the new postal service but oldsters like me are itching to get something really new from the USPS. What if they added an electronic piece to the mail stream so you could get an email that your package was being delivered today so make sure someone is home to sign for it. Or you got a singing telegram through your cell phone. I would pay for that. Or maybe a drop site where you could save a dime of the postage if you picked up at a centralized location, one that sent you a text when your letter is ready for pick up.

Swiss Post has more than 20 new services up and running that go beyond traditional mail delivery including geo tracking and converting physical mail to digital so you can view it on your computer. It's a model of what can be done and should be done with our Postal Service. Our Postal Service could be the most innovative instead of on life support.

The Postal Service historically spends about ½ of 1% on research and development, which is where all the future revenues are waiting. While Facebook, Google, and Twitter spread like kudzu the Postal Service is reviewing spreadsheets trying to find costs to cut.

It's time for radical thinking in the USPS. Use some of the money saved by cutting jobs and facilities and figure out the new businesses the Postal Service can serve. How can the network and locations of the Postal Service be used in this brave new world? The USPS has survived many setbacks in the last 200 years and I predict it will survive the internet as well. I look forward to seeing more forward thinking come out of one our most valued institutions.