I am working on putting the first Knowledge Exchange Summit (KES) Newsletter together this weekend, and I am looking for some input.

I believe that there are some of you out there that would be interested in a deeper exploration of some of the topics that I write about on the blog. I like to keep my blog posts short and use them to expose a couple of thoughts that I find interesting and/or useful.

So here is the question: What would you like to see in the newsletter?

• Specific tools and techniques for small business online?
• Productivity information?

I would like to see this newsletter become a private coffee-shop style exchange of information that leads to a better understanding of the art that we are working on (that may sound a little odd, wait for my review of The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield next week).

Why we do what we do.

Who we are doing it for.

What we hope to accomplish.

This is your chance to get involved, pick my brain, and get yours picked too. We are in this together and I would love to get your input. Leave a comment, or if you prefer to remain anonymous, send me an e-mail [ stephen at stephenpsmith dot com].

Register for the newsletter here (if you can’t see the form, click here: KES)

Email Marketing You Can Trust

We called it a “summit” and had invited a few more people to join us in COncord, NH, but bad weather here prevented the rest from attending. Undeterred, we took the opportunity to really dive in to our own businesses and take a good hard look at what we do, what we sell, who our clients are, and how we can serve them more successfully.

I learned a lot from the group, especially with regards to the tools of production and design of the products that I create. I also discovered that there were some pretty important things that I did not know that I did not know! The unknown unknowns are always the most dangerous, aren’t they?

How a Knowledge Exchange can help your business

Getting together with like-minded individuals can create a tremendous opportunity for sharing and collaborating. I found this meeting to be particularly valuable because I had the chance to meet with people in very different industries, which gave me a chance to think about new ways of applying the things that I do. Flexing your mental muscles is always refreshing.

We talked about products.

We talked about services.

We talked about SEO and web design.

We took a look at each others’ websites. (This was especially fun, because we have such different approaches to what we are trying to accomplish.)

This is something that any one of you can do, that is, put together a meeting of the minds and share your knowledge. Learn something from another businessperson. The beauty of this idea is that you can do it in person, with local businesspeople, or you can do it online. See what Dave Seah had to say about the meeting here :

The key pieces fell into place at the informal New Hampshire Knowledge Exchange that Stephen Smith and I held up in Concord NH. Stephen arranged for a conference room at The Centennial Hotel (the staff was very accommodating) and four of us showed up despite the threat of snowstorms. Neither Stephen or I knew exactly how this would work, but we had a simple agenda: (1) Find out what people were wanting to know and then (2) Share our relevant expertise.

It ended up being quite informative for me, because Stephen’s knowledge and experience with using the Internet as the platform for his information and knowledge-based businesses filled in the missing pieces. Plus, Stephen has the mindset of an independent business owner coupled with his years of hospitality management experience. Here’s the distillation of what I learned, framed in the context of my current drive to adopt the “owner” mentality: (Getting Unstuck at the Knowledge Exchange)

This meeting got me to thinking about how to apply this meeting format in a larger group, and how to share it with everyone. I was also struck by the parallels to the Linchpin mind-set that came up in the discussions. Each person in this meeting is working hard, creating some amazing art, and is bent on owning the means of their own production. That last part is essential to the Linchpin Way of doing business.

The Linchpin Way

My friend Justin McCullough has put together a community site on ning.com for cultivating the Linchpin Mindset. Called The Linchpin Way, it is a place for this type of knowledge exchange to take place regardless of geography and availability. Click that link and join us. Tell us about your situation and what you have to share, or what you would like to learn.

If you are still not sure what all of this means to you, or how you can use it, here are a couple of additional resources:

Order the book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
(from Amazon, aff link).

And sign up for the Knowledge Exchange newsletter. I will publish this from time to time with more detailed news and information about what we are working on, as well the time and registration information for future Summits (all free, too).

I will also be using this newsletter for more in-depth book reviews than the ones I post here on the site. This will give you a chance to learn a little more about how the books I share affect my life and business.

I am tentatively planning the first newsletter for Friday, 5 March 2010.

Email Marketing You Can Trust
If you are reading this via RSS and can’t see the sign-up form, please click on the post title to come to the website and register. Thank you!

Today is Groundhog Day!

It is time to review my Second Period Goals, then give a brief outline of what I have planned for the Third Period (4 March to 3 April 2010). I am not going to call these review/planning periods “months” or “monthly” because there will only be 11 of them, including the year-end review on 12 Dec.

I have been good at keeping the promise I made to myself to be diligent with my Weekly Reviews, taking careful notes, and saving all of my planning sheets. I also created a pretty cool flowchart for marketing and linking the new products that I plan to create this year with the existing product/service line.

This flowchart was enhanced and improved in a recent meeting that I had with my friend Dave Seah, in our Knowledge Exchange Summit last week. The KES is a pretty cool new thing that he and I are going to do this year, and we will both be writing more about it this month. To get in on the discussion and find out more about the KES please register for the newsletter, here:

Email Marketing You Can Trust
If you are reading this via RSS and can’t see the sign-up form, please click on the post title to come to the website and register. Thank you!

Second Period Review

My Period 2 goals were a little more ambitious, focusing on seeing some positive progress on a major goal that has been back-burnered for too long.

1. Maintain exercise program – Fail. I pretty much gave up on this, I must re-focus. I need more accountability for this to work…
2. Read 1 book per week – Success! I actually completed 5 books this period (All of these books will be the subjects of more detailed reviews in the KES newsletter – coming soon):
   • SWAT (review at the link)
   • The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield – an amazing book that I will be reviewing next week and hosting a contest for a free copy
   • The Next 100 Years – a look at the world’s geopolitical future
   • More Space – a book of business essays that I read last year and wanted to catch up on the ideas. I wondered if any of the predictions had come true…will be writing more about this later this month
   • The Devil in the Kitchen -  a book that I received for Christmas, about Chef Marco Pierre White
3. Work on the Productivity Book – This goal has been revised and re-designed after reading SWAT. I need to approach the book from a completely different angle!
   • Add Kanban implementation - Done
   • Write Introduction - First draft done
   • Organize Chapters - change to Organize Appendices
   • Create Artwork - Not done. I have to re-think the artwork needs, as the entire concept has changed from that of a technical manual to a business fable
4. Staff Evaluations (@Tavern) – Half done. Scheduling conflicts with some of the staff has stretched this out to a second week.
5. General’s Club Rollout (@Tavern) – Done! This has been very effective, and all of the delegated processes are in place for handling registration, data entry, and mailing Welcome Packages

Overall, I am pretty excited about how this program is working. I would rate the effectiveness as “high” and my morale and motivation are very good as well. It is just the exercising part that has me stymied.

Here are some details from my Periodic Review notebook:

• My exercise routine was hard for me to follow. For some reason I just can’t get motivated to do the exercises, whether I tried to do them first thing in the morning or later in the day.
• My biggest waste of time: I hate to say it, but this entry was very consistent – being at the Tavern. Business was pretty slow, especially this past week due to the “threat” of blizzard conditions every day. The level of business in the off-season requires that I be there to keep an eye on things due to the lack of being able to pay a supervisor to do the “babysitting”.
• The best ROI that I recorded came from my days off from the Tavern, where I was able to spend some time with the Lovely Bride and we could enjoy ourselves. She works days, I work nights, so we do not get a lot of time together during the week.

Action Steps for Improvement

As part of the GHD review, I think that it is important to look at the failings and successes of the period and learn from them. What did I do well, and why? What did I not do well, and how can I improve?

I suspect that my exercise problem has to do with accountability and with revising my morning schedule. Everything that I do when I first get out of bed is pretty standard, and has been for a while. This means creating a new habit, which is a pretty difficult thing to do. I have been keeping a checklist on my Kanban board for logging the days that I exercise, but that just isn’t working. I need to put it in a more conspicuous place. And I need someone to push me.

More on this later. Here are my new-and-improved goals for the next period:

Period 3 – Due 4 April

1. Maintain exercise program – use Twitter or Facebook for accountability?
2. Read 1 book per week
3. Create 1 free product (Like the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context)
4. Work on the Productivity Book

   • Write Conclusion
   • Send out for copy-editing
   • Prepare cover art
   • Contact possible reviewers
   • Brainstorm freebies and bonuses
   • Create outline for story
   • Brainstorm characters/roles
   • Map out basic plot
   • Start writing!
5. Brainstorm ideas for new training courses

So far, so good. Just writing this post has been very revealing and cathartic. I feel really good about this program and encourage you to create something like it for yourself. Send me an e-mail [stephen at stephenpsmith dot com] if you need help, I’d love to see some more folks get involved and share their progress.

You can still join in on this running experiment, leave a comment or email a link to your own post.

Introducing the New Book from Behance & 99%: “Making Ideas Happen” :: Articles :: The 99 Percent

I found that one’s methods for organization are just as important as the quality of one’s ideas. How you manage projects, how (and when) you conduct meetings, how you allocate your time on a daily basis – these seemingly “uncreative” activities matter. I’ll go further: they make a dramatic impact that is often the difference between success and… yet another idea that didn’t happen.

But organization isn’t everything. There are other common themes among prolific creative leaders, notably how they engage their community and how they lead others in creative pursuits. I found that the capacity to make ideas happen could be distilled into a simple framework:

Making Ideas Happen = (Ideas) + Organization & Execution + Communal Forces + Leadership Capability

The methods and practices in each part of the above equation are absolutely essential when it comes to creative execution. Yet nearly all of these activities – perhaps because they come after the “idea” – are vastly undervalued. In fact, many of the forces that are crucial to making ideas happen may seem counter-intuitive at first blush.

Things like acting without conviction, skipping regular meetings, sharing ownership of your ideas, encouraging your team to fight, using appreciations instead of critical feedback, and drawing strength from others’ doubts.

Many of the forces that are crucial to making ideas happen may seem counter-intuitive at first blush.

These and many other surprising insights that emerged have changed the way I work and live my life. Needless to say, the process of writing the book was a 99% case study in itself. During the course of the project, I was able to put many of the insights I was observing into practice.

I have not read the book yet, it will be released on 15 April this year, you can pre-order it here:

Well, yes and no. Systems Thinking is an approach to problem-solving and project management that encompasses, er, the entire system of inputs and their transformation into outputs that you are, ah, thinking about. While it would seem that this is a difficult subject to tackle (like calculus), it really isn’t. My friend and doppleganger Timothy Johnson (@carpefactum on Twitter) has written a brilliant book about the subject:

The book (and a cup of tea)

Systems Thinking and GTD

Getting Things Done is a form of systems thinking, a way of looking at your entire workflow – your inputs (things that you need to do) and how they get transformed into the outputs (successful accomplishments). GTD for your own workflow is a focused, personal way of using systems thinking. It is also useful to consider how you can utilize this format of problem-solving in a larger view – that of the complete environment in which you are working.

Whatever your job is (your own personal system) you will have interactions with other systems (co-workers and other departments) that have an effect on your inputs and outputs. Call it an orbital-level perspective.

I finished the book earlier today, and wanted to share my thoughts in a little video (click more to see it):

Share your thoughts in the Comments and buy the book from Amazon here (aff link)

[Editor's note to the FTC: I did receive a copy of this product for free in exchange for writing a review, no other compensation or expectation of a positive review was expressed or implied.]

You need to read Seth Godin’s Linchpin. Or be a cog in the machine. Your choice.

In my mind, one of the most valuable things in this book is a chart on page 181. There are two axes. The x-axis goes from passive to passionate. The y-axis goes from attachment (that is, inflexible dedication to your own world view) to discernment (knowing what to live with and what to seek change in). I would call that y-axis “wisdom”. Seth wants you to aim for the upper left, high passion plus high wisdom, the realm of the linchpin.

From my years of experience working with people, passion is a trait most visible in the young. Wisdom is a trait that is more visible in people who are more experienced. This is why there are so few wise and passionate linchpins. Seth would never be so crass as to typecast people by age, but I know there are plenty of experienced and wise but passive people (he calls them bureaucrats, you know the type) and plenty of young, passionate, and inflexible people (he calls them fundamentalist zealots.) This is why the wise, passionate person stands out.

The real reason I like this book is that after nearly 30 years of work I have arrived in a place Seth would describe as a linchpin and I am loving it. I have always been as passionate and creative as I can, just to amuse myself, why work if it’s boring. This is a childish quality but I retain it at age 51. On the other hand, I have learned some discernment that I sure didn’t have in 1982. Every quarter, my boss (and I have had many) sets goals with me related to what the company needs. At the end of the quarter, often, what I accomplish is very different from what we thought would be useful. But typically, that boss looks at what I did and says “that was what we needed” and rewards me anyway. I cannot be a cog, and fortunately, they have recognized that a cog is not what they need. In the long term, all of my success so far has come from this sort of thinking.

“Lucky” is absolutely what I am. Here’s what I do to earn my luck:

* Write a blog post or two a day.
* Write a newsletter every week.
* Comment and connect with others daily.
* Answer and send hundreds of emails daily.
* Read voraciously.
* Work with the best clients I can find.
* Reach into new markets weekly.
* Travel extensively.

Seems lucky to me.

After writing yesterday’s post about my thoughts on Dave Seah’s Groundhog Day Kickoff, I sat down with my trusty notebook and poured out my feelings on the matter of how I arrive at the conclusions that I do.

Looking at a blank page can be a trying experience!

I overcame the difficulty and just started by writing down the questions that I was thinking about answering. Based on the goals that I had set for myself over the next few months I decided to ask myself:

1. Why am I doing these things?
2. How did I reach these conclusions?
3. What makes me think that these are the best goals?
   • Am I sure that the ladder I am climbing is against the right wall?
   • Do I know what is supposed to be at the top of the ladder?
4. 

   Thanks to Hugh McLeod

   Why do I think about this cartoon so much?

5. If I was so moved by The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel
   (aff link) and Anathem
   (aff link), what have I learned and applied from them?

These are big questions and are in need of serious consideration.

Revelations Inside the Goals

In addition, while looking over my goals for February (Period 2), I noticed that I had included some goals for my job as restaurant manager, but there were no “job”-related goals in any of the other future periods. Why is this?

Is it sabotage? Fear of Failure, or of Success? Do I harbor misgivings, or wonder about its permanence? (Those answers will have to wait for another day, I fear) Otherwise the goals are straight out of my “Three Words “ for 2010: Focus, Discipline, Exercise (mental & physical). Long-term, high-value, personal development for business development – a good strategy, I think.

Much of the reading and study that I have done over the past few years has guided me toward this set of goals, in this structure. The idea, unspoken until now, is to create a platform for my products and services that allows them to mutually support each other, building upon successes and creating a passive income stream that will finance further creative efforts. The really smart (and successful) people that I pay attention to have done these things, so it only seems natural that I do something similar – in the areas of work that I am passionate about.

What is holding me back?

Another commonality about this set of goals is that they are all activities that make me the owner of my own means of production (and who doesn’t want that?). Yet somehow they keep getting put off or delayed by other commitments. Two years in a row now I have taken the plunge into working for myself, for a while, then gone ahead and accepted a full-time-plus “job” working for someone else. Filling another business-owner’s pockets with the fruits of my labor. Sure I get paid, but only so much, no matter how much effort I put into it. Or how creative I get. Or how successful it happens to be.

And it takes me away from what I truly love to do, reach out to and help you, the readers and visitors.

Why is that? The short answer is because it is hard work. The long answer would, I’m sure, fascinate a behavioral psychologist. But I am pretty sure none of you would be…

Here are some thoughts I captured after thinking about this for a while:

Step back & look at the larger picture

I am good at seeing patterns.

• My sub-conscious mind seems to put things together for me.
• I have learned to trust my intuition. But it is quite possible that I use it as a crutch.
• What I do not do is make enough use of the available tools and techniques that enhance the process.
• Sometimes I get carried away by the details.

So the answers, if they may be called that, seem to be discoverable through:

1. Taking a step back and looking at the larger picture. How does what I am doing now affect the outcome of everything else I am involved in?
2. Analyze the path between the beginning and the end state. What were the initial conditions? What is the final result? What steps took place to get there? Could there have been an alternative step that may have yielded a better result?
3. Learn to use the available tools to make this process less arduous and more profitable.
4. Share results of the analysis and solicit feedback. Iterate changes when analysis reveals high probability of a superior solution.

This will definitely take some getting used to, and will not be applicable in every situation. And I will get back to you on The Glass Bead Game and Anathem. (Seriously, read those books)

My promise to you

I will keep at it. The Doing and the Being, and intentionally maintaining an awareness of my thought-processes. I will also push back against the Resistance of that old “Lizard Brain” ( I just read a book about this, sheesh, talk about an epiphany). I feel that this is very important to me and my own growth, and I like to think that some of you reading this will learn something about yourselves or share some insights with me. We are all on this journey together, I look forward to hearing from you.

Some resources I used to create this strategy

http://chrisg.com/
http://johnhaydon.com/
http://ittybiz.com/
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
http://copyblogger.com/
http://problogger.net/
http://chrisbrogan.com/
http://davidseah.com/
http://mark-hayward.com/blog/
http://wordsellinc.com/

Groundhog Day Resolutions 2010 Kickoff

Seah spends more time in his blogging sharing personal insights than I do, and perhaps that is simply a matter of style. Or it could be a holdover from the “old me” – a complete introvert, nose buried in a book and a very small circle of real friends. Or, as I think about it a little more, it could be because I tend to intuitively arrive at decisions and conclusions without really having to think through the intermediary steps. I have always done this, it caused no end of frustration in school, especially in math class…where “showing the steps” was allegedly essential in Basic Algebra. Hmmm…

Note to self: Think about how you arrived at your conclusion. Show your work, it’s a little bit more important now. In fact, your life may depend on it.

Anyway, the first piece of Seah’s post that I want to share is about what he has resolved for 2010:

The first two resolutions were restatements of my 2007 resolutions: write about what catches my eye, create that which illuminates and achieve financial independence through what I create. I knew it wasn’t going to be the “fast track” to money, but it was the way I decided I wanted to do it. A little later that year, I finally noticed that the more I worked with other people on their projects, the better my own projects seemed to go. That lead to a new directive: Be involved with dreams that are larger than myself.

By the end of the year, my Groundhog Day Resolutions had coalesced into a set of principles:

* Communicate with a variety of people in a variety of ways. Be interested! Have real conversations with them! Do it face-to-face, and through online media.
* Create tangible new things every day, then show what you’ve made to those people you’re talking to.
* Be involved in other people’s dreams that are larger than yourself, with people I like and respect.

These are external principles that seem to serve me well, and they have been stated for the past five years of my blogging in various ways. It hasn’t been always easy to maintain the momentum, particularly when it came to creating everyday.

Robert Hruzek, Joanna Young, Brad Shorr at SOBCon

I had never really thought about it, but these are very similar principles to the ones that guide my own life. The last time that I actually sat down and thought about my own guiding principles was last year at this time when I started putting down the outline of my 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in Context e-book. These principles, especially that of collaborating with others on projects bigger than myself, really coalesced after my first experience at SOBCon in Chicago (May 2008).

The seeds of the personal and online network that that experience planted have grown and blossomed into something that I would never have dreamed possible: real friends and collaborators that I can ask for help when I need it, and whom I am happy to help when they ask. And they do ask. Not just for links or re-Tweets or things like that, but for my honest opinion on their work and their dreams. I find it humbling and thrilling at the same time.

Reading Seah’s post made me realize that I had completely internalized these principles. I just don’t think about them anymore, I live them. One of the first things that I do when I find something interesting or valuable is share it with my network, ask for thoughts and Ideas (yes, big “I” ideas), and volunteer to share my own efforts to make it into something bigger (like work.life.creativity – which I will be the first to admit needs a little more attention).

As I am writing this post, the gears are turning in the back of my brain, and I believe that I would benefit from re-establishing these principles, and making them part of my daily routine. Really thinking about and analyzing how they affect the things that I am working on, not just here but in my role as the Tavern manager too. You would thank that with the amount of effort I put into creating things, tracking them and managing them, I would think a little harder about how they got there…

Seah goes on to add another layer to his overall strategy:

However, late in 2009 I had formulated two additional principles, which are curiously-contradictory:

* Just do is about doing something that changes something about the world, and then quantifying its effect. This is the action-oriented, metrics-based approach to productivity we’re familiar with. This is the direct approach.
* Just be, by comparison, is more about observation and context than action. The change in the world, come from the cycle of observing what is happening, and then reacting to it as part of the mysterious flow of it all. This is a more artistic approach to life, and the surprising thing is that the world also changes just by your being in it.

Finding the balance between “just doing” and “just being” is helping to unlock my creativity and productivity.

The “A-ha Moment”

Indeed, finding the balance is always the most interesting part of your life and work and job. I am pretty good at the Just Do part of this whole journey/adventure. In fact, I have spent the past three years working very hard on training myself to embrace my ADD in order to find and implement routines and lifestyle structures that allow me to be productive and effective. Observing and iterating these activities into a ruthlessly efficient productivity practice.

Only recently have I decided to push myself to do something creative every day, to start thinking more about thinking, and to really discipline myself into starting less Projects in order to complete more of them. But there is something more to it, something missing from that equation: Observe and reflect upon what effect my actions are having on the world around me.

I will admit that I have been in a bit of a “funk” lately, working (too?) hard and accomplishing quite a bit. But I have not been my normal, smiling self (the Lovely Bride has commented on it more than once in the past month). Because I can see that I have not created the balance that I need, I have been pre-occupied with the Doing and paying scant attention to the Being. (I just checked, and I have not written my Morning Pages since 23 Jan.)

So, here goes. I have a few things that I have scheduled for myself in the Doing column to complete yet this morning, so I am going to go and do them. One of those things is the laundry, which offers me a chance to have about an hour to just Be. To observe and reflect. To a kind of mind-dump, not the “what are my open loops and what do I need to do to close them” sort, but the “why am I motivated to do the things that I do” type. Or whatever turns up.

I will write it all down and report back tomorrow. It should be interesting…

The Seventh Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper

Welcome to the February 2, 2010 edition of carnival of pen, pencil and paper. My name is Melinda and I happy to be the host this month!