This past Thursday I had the great pleasure of meeting for a day with my colleague Dave Seah to exchange some knowledge, best practices and ideas. I also got to met Dave’s friends Sid and Joanne, who brought some great questions and insights.

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.

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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:

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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.

“Systems Thinking!?!” Yikes, what is that? Is it like calculus?

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):
(more…)

[Editor's note: This is another post in the Kinda Personal category, and it's fairly long. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!]

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? (more…)