Facing Reality

Garrison Keeler quoted Jack Dempsey yesterday on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” as saying that “A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.”  I like that definition because it is clear, simple and very challenging. In a few weeks I will be 63, and like way too many other people around the world I am facing fear and uncertainty. My earning years are coming to an end and I am still trying to recover from the dot-com implosion of 2001. Now along comes the Great Recession and I feel the daily body punches that life seems to be handing out like free tickets to a bad movie.

To make matters worse, so many people who are supposed to be our leaders are behaving instead like adolescent kids with an acne problem. I am getting increasingly angry with the politics of fear, hypocrisy and outright lies that fills the nightly news. What I want is for us to stop fighting with each other and start pulling in the same direction.

We are not going to get out of this massive mess until we face some basic realities. First, this mess was created by our collective greed. People purchased houses and stuff they wanted but could not afford, financed by bankers who should have known better, underwritten by Wall Street where greed is institutionalized and traded daily based on rules that Washington politicians wrote assuming that greed is good. Well, greed may be one heck of a motivator, but greed is not an admirable quality and our collective failure to recognize this is causing millions, if not billions of people to pay the price of that failure. For us to pull together, we must learn the concept of “enough”. Fortunately, I see lots of evidence that this is starting to happen. People are spending less on useless stuff, starting gardens and refocusing on what is really important: family, friends and community.

The second reality we haven’t faced is that superficiality is not a substitute for intimate friendships. We ask each other, “How are you?” but do we really want to hear the answer?  As a man in this society, I was trained not to be emotional because “Men don’t cry” and, “If I am open and vulnerable with you, you will take this as a sign of weakness and eat me alive.” This may be true when dealing with some men, but the men I have worked with have shown a deep hunger for open, honest and deep friendships. I sit in a men’s circle with a few other men and we share what is happening in our lives and support each other to look fiercely and deeply at what we can do to make ourselves “better men.” This is one of the few places in my life where I am safe being completely open and honest because I know that nobody is going to judge me or try to fix me. They just love me fiercely, and I them.  What we often learn is that we are all going through our own variations on the same theme. Superficiality is safe, but ultimately, it is lonely and unsatisfying.  My wife and I watched “The Devil Wears Prada” a few nights ago, and its underlying message was that friends are real and although high fashion may appeal to the eye, it leaves the heart empty.

My men’s circle is part of a larger organization dedicated to service. I find that in giving service, I become refreshed and renewed. Whether you are part of a service organization, a church or just a circle of friends, I encourage you to take a risk and go deep. Tell your friends what’s really up for you, and listen to them just as deeply as you want to be listened to. You might be amazed at how wonderful this can feel.

The third reality is that emotional pain may be uncomfortable but it is not necessarily a bad thing. I distinguish between physical and emotional pain because emotional pain is self-inflicted and comes from our wanting things to be different than they are. Right now, I want to have a larger bank balance, and I can create all sorts of stress and discomfort if I focus too much on what isn’t instead of what is. Emotional pain can serve as a way of focusing our attention on what’s really important. People are losing their jobs and their homes and way too many of us are too close to the edge. I speak from personal truth here; but I have learned three important truths about emotional pain: it cannot kill me; given time, it will pass; and the quickest way to get to the other side is to dive in and feel it.

I have seen and sat with men who have touched ancient pain, and the act of feeling it always seems to lessen the pain itself; and that has been my personal experience as well.

What’s an aging boomer to do? The only answers I can come up with are to scale back, focus on loving and listening to my family and friends and … keep getting up.

In Trying Times, You Need a Better Plan

I knew I was in trouble by the middle of last year. Every approach I had tried to getting new customers was meeting with the same results: nada. There were clues all around me, but I was stubbornly hanging on to my belief that I could get customers without rethinking what I was offering them. I tried radio spots, yellow pages, Google ads, cold calls and occasional prayers; but the customers stayed away in droves. As the economy melted down, I wanted to believe that was the problem rather than the way I was defining my value to the market.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: If I tell someone that “We do custom software application development for local businesses,” I might as well be shining a halogen lamp at a herd of deer. The message simply does not connect. Even Bob Sytsma, my CPA, could not clearly articulate what we do in terms that would help prospective customers recognize our value.

Now most people who know me tell me that I am a reasonably smart fellow, but I was clearly not smart enough to find my way through this mess. So I started asking for help. I reached out to people in the community like Matthew Dunn, one of the brightest people I know. We had breakfast a couple months ago at the Rhodes Café and Matthew pointed out that I am one of the best planners and analytical writers he knows. What if I offered that service to others? He was inviting me to step outside the box I had defined myself in and look closely at what other assets I have in my inventory that I was undervaluing.

His suggestion prompted me to take a deep look at my business. I started by making a thorough assessment of my financial situation, my market offerings, my people and my business processes, and started to explore possible strategies. I wrote all of this down, not because I wanted to worship at the altar of a business plan, but because the thought process itself proved to have great value.

What emerged was the realization that there is one asset I had massively undervalued, and all it took was to think about that asset in a different way.

I have been a software developer for over 40 years. I love the process of conceiving and building systems that help run businesses more effectively. In the process of building solutions for local businesses, I have developed a collection of code that I was thinking of as a “platform” that we could use to speed the development of custom applications. I showed this platform to Paul Grey, chair of TAG who has had years of experience building and selling software solutions and he gave me a key piece of insight. There are three types of software programs: platforms, applications and features. He pointed out that a feature such as a $0.99 ring tone is easy to sell by the millions. An application is more difficult, and a platform is even more difficult. By positioning what I was offering as a platform, I was making it more abstract and more difficult to sell. Instead, he suggested that I position it in terms that people will easily understand.

I took Paul’s advice to heart and simply changed the way I present what we have done more as a set of features that form a solution to a specific business problem.  I demonstrated this to one person after another, and the difference in reaction was palpable. Instead of shining a light at a herd of deer, it felt like I was offering them a garden of their favorite munchies.

My next clue came when I presented my program to the folks at the Bellingham Chamber of Commerce. They liked what they saw, but my inner geek was popping out in the ways I described some of the features and this was causing the halogen light and the deer herd effect. Drew Graham copped to completely tuning out when I slipped into geek speak.

So the lesson here is to let someone else demonstrate the product. But my ego resisted. “Who could possibly know more about it than me?” it asked. And therein lies the rub. My technical knowledge was getting in the way. If the product is so simple, it should not require me to demonstrate it. Someone who is not a techno-geek should be able to present it even better than me. So from this point forward, all demos will be done by Shelly Varner, my sales person. I will relegate myself to the back room where she can slip pizza under the door and let me focus on making the product better.

So now, on to the next question: how to market this wonderful new product? Again, my ego wanted to drive the bus, but I am fortunate enough to have a lot of friends in this town who are graciously willing to offer me their help, support and ideas. One of these friends is Bruce MacCormack. He called me a couple weeks ago to introduce Sharon Atkins. Bruce thought Sharon might be able to help me with my marketing efforts. On the strength of Bruce’s recommendation, I met with Sharon and I am so thankful that I did. I had lunch with Sharon on a Friday and gave her that plan I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. She thought about it over the weekend and we met the following Tuesday when she walked me through a plan that was bold, imaginative and exciting. She gave me great insight, ideas and highly effective marketing counsel. I don’t know whether her ideas will actually work, but they are certainly better than mine.

So let me sum this up. I haven’t told you anything about the product I am about to release because if Sharon’s plan works, you will hear about it soon enough. The real point is that I asked for help from people smarter than I am, listened to what they said and parked my own ego. Now all I have to do is remember to feed the ego-parking meter while continuing to invite feedback and support from the great people in this town. Have you got any for me?

Wonderful Wikis

In my last posting, I talked about social media. Several months have passed now, and I can say with a bit more experience under my belt that I still don’t have the time, energy or interest to blog or read other’s blogs; but wikis are wonderful… within limits.

What’s a wiki, you ask? According to Wikipedia, “A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute to or modify content.”  Wikipedia is an excellent example of a wiki site. It is an online encyclopedia that is growing massively, both in content and popularity. If you haven’t used it, I highly recommend giving it a try. Think of some term or concept that you want to learn more about. Let’s use “Bellingham” as an example. Did you know that there is a town called Bellingham in Tasmania, two in England, and three in the US? Bellingham, Minnesota has a population of 191. And Governor Bellingham is a fictional character in The Scarlet Letter. Where did all of this material come from? How accurate is it? How does editing get controlled? These are all excellent questions, and the answers are on Wikipedia, but the short answer is that the content comes from you and me, there are built-in processes for improving the accuracy of information and the control processes seem to work well. But I am not writing this to sell you on Wikipedia, but to introduce a powerful set of tools that are based on the wiki concepts.

As you may know from my past posts, I am active in The Mankind Project, an international organization to help men become more conscious. I am leading an effort to create a new version of a facilitator’s guide for one of our important trainings, and I needed to elicit the cooperation and support of a team of men from all over the world. After my last ODNT posting, I looked at several tools that allow collaborative document sharing and settled on settled on Google Sites (http://sites.google.com).

In about five minutes, I was able to create a basic web site. Over a single weekend, I took a manual that was over 130 pages long, broke it into about 100 individual topics and created web pages for each. I then entered the email addresses of the men on the team and gave each man rights to update the site by changing the content of any page, adding new pages, adding comments to pages and even attaching documents to pages. This whole process took me only a few hours.

One powerful feature of Google Sites is the capability to have the site notify me whenever a page is updated. I can monitor specific pages or the entire site. Whenever anybody updates a page, I get an email moments later. I can easily tell who is working on what and even see what changes they made. If necessary, I can even roll back a page to a previous version of that page.

That site now contains 165 pages and updates are made on a regular basis by men all over the world.
It didn’t take long before I started thinking of other ways to use Google Sites. I created a site for community leaders to capture and record meeting minutes and governance documents. I created another for our elder community to capture our history, and another for my own company to use internally to capture business policies and procedures. Creating each of these sites took only a few minutes, and populating them is amazingly easy. And did I mention that it is all free! Each Google site can use up to 100MB of storage. My largest site, the one with 165 pages uses only 17% of this allocation.

So what’s the downside? Google Sites has lots of strengths, but it also has some problems.  I would like to see a more flexible security model and a better HTML text editor, but these are not the kinds of issues that will stop me from using Google Sites. Google Sites are not the best tool for creating a marketing site or one that interacts with a database engine, but they are an excellent tool for collaborative development of information.

If this topic interests you, I invite you to participate in an experiment. I have created a public wiki that is dedicated to capturing information about Bellingham. The address is:
http://sites.google.com/site/bellinghamwiki/

Right now, the site has only skeletal content. If you want to add content to this site, simply email me (bob@socgrp.com) and I will grant you update rights. I will moderate the site to make sure that no content is posted that might be offensive to the public taste, but other than that, anything goes… at least for the moment.

Social Media

I was skeptical last week on my way to the Social Media Northwest conference at Whatcom Community College. The term “social media” sounded to me as if it were made up by a randomized buzzword generator. I knew that it had something to do with blogging and that Tom Dorr of the Small Business Development Center had pitched me personally to get me to come, but I had (and still have) lots of questions. What is “social media” and why should I care? By the end of the two day conference, I realized with both excitement and fear that this old dog had better learn some new tricks.

So what is social media? One way to think about it is as a collection of emerging technologies that includes social networks, directories, video sharing sites, blogs and Wikis that all have the notion of community collaboration in common. Wikipedia, an on-line collaborative encycloperia is a good example. In the past few years, Wikipedia use has been growing by over 20% per year. On the other hand, Microsoft Encarta, has been dropping in popularity. The difference is that Wikipedia is maintained and updated by a world-wide community of people, while Encarta is maintained by a single, centralized organization. This notion of community is at the heart of the term “social media.”

Mike Rich from ComScore tracks the digital landscape. At the conference, he presented one slide that showed social media technologies as the fastest growing segment of all Internet technologies at over 60% growth per year. So clearly something is happening here, but what it is, ain’t exactly clear… at least to me.
Throughout the conference, one speaker after another talked about viral marketing, blogging, social networking and social referral sites. At the end of the conference, Matthew Dunn interviewed Bob Pritchett (Logos), Brett Allsop, (president of Allsop Inc and co-founder of Yapta) and Chris Galvin (Wizards of the Coast). All three told compelling stories of how blogging and other social media tools have helped grow their businesses.

I left the conference intrigued and puzzled. I understand the concept of “viral marketing,” but the trick is in finding a viral message. Perhaps the best example is the “Will It Blend” videos on YouTube. This fellow in a white lab jacket holds up an object like a golf ball or an iPod and asks, “Will it blend?” as he drops it into a blender. Moments later the object is reduced to dust. The videos are so weird and funny that many people can’t resist telling their friends about it. When you watch the video, do you find yourself thinking, “That is one bad-assed blender” and maybe clicking through to the blender maker’s site? That’s viral marketing.
It was also pretty clear to me how blogging helps companies that serve an international market; but how would it help local businesses that serve other local businesses? Did I expect local business owners to start reading blogs? Not really, but I realized that if I want to help local business owners grow their businesses using information technologies, I had better get up to speed on the pros and cons of these social media technologies.

I went back to my office and created a Facebook account. Within a few minutes, I had a site working and I began collecting “friends”. I set a rule for myself that I would only add people who I know and appreciate having in my life… or were in my extended family. Within a couple days, the list had grown to over 40. It was pretty cool reconnecting with people I had almost lost track of and learning what they are up to now; however, I am still not clear on how Facebook will help my business.

I can clearly see how social networking tools can build my list of relationships and help me stay in touch with people, but unless this has a direct feed to my business, its value to me is less clear.
But what about blogs and blogging? This question has several related questions:

•    Who is my audience?
•    What do I have to say of value to that audience?
•    How will my audience even know that I am blogging?

In order to dig more deeply into these questions, I decided to conduct an experiment and start a blog. My trusty intern from Western, Andy Jaeger, got a blogging site set up and operational in about an hour using WordPress. He populated the blog with several of the prior issues of this column and I wrote some new blogs under the category of “Growing a small business.” Our blog site is at socratesgroup.wordpress.com. Check it out. I would be interested to hear any feedback you have.
I suspect that blogging makes lots of sense for some businesses and little sense for others. What is your experience? What are your questions and thoughts on Social Media? Please email me and let me know. In the next month I will sort this out and get back to you. In the meantime, this old dog is learning lots of new tricks.

Ground Rules for a Better Life

About a month ago, I pulled together 28 men from around the Mankind Project to come to Bellingham and listen to Jim Mitchell teach a class called “The Balanced Man.” In the class, Jim presented a wonderful panoply of tools and ground rules for living a better life.

One ground rule Jim offered is, “Fire your rep.” What he means by this phrase is that each of us has a part of us that wants to manage other people’s perception of us. It’s as if we have our very own sales representative out there selling ourselves to other people. The problem with our rep, though, is that most people can see right through it, either consciously or unconsciously. At some level, when they know they are dealing with the part of us that wants to manipulate them somehow, they will trust us less.

So what motivates our rep? What drives us to show you pieces of us that aren’t real? Even more importantly, what’s would happen if we let each other see us as we really are? As a man in this culture, I have been trained that if I let you really see me, warts and all, you will see me as weak and attack me. During my teenage years, this belief was reinforced over and over again. So I grew a “rep” to keep you at a distance and make myself safe… or at least give myself the illusion of safety.

What if my assumption that being open and vulnerable means that others will attack me is not entirely true? Is it possible that being open and honest about who I really am will create the kinds of relationships that I deeply desire? Let’s explore that question.

I believe that each of us is made up of many parts. Some parts of each person are beautiful and brilliant. Everybody has something in or about them that makes them stand out in their own unique way. For some of us, those parts may be very large, and for many of us, they may be only small parts; but we all have something that is pretty special. Depending on what our parents taught us, we may let those brilliant parts of us out, we may over-hype them, or we may hide them away.

And we have some parts that are, truth be told, a bloody mess. There are parts of me that I carry deep judgments about. Whenever I touch those parts, my inner critic goes, “Boy did you screw that up again!” My rep is certainly not going to let you see those screwed up parts of me, but they are still sitting in the room with me, wherever I am.

The rest of us is average, plus or minus. With 6.9 billion people in the world, the likelihood that any part of us is perfect is pretty darn small, and if we did make it to the top of the heap in any one area, we become a very big target for others to shoot at.

Now my inner critic doesn’t want you to know that I am really just an average guy, and it certainly doesn’t want you to see how screwed up parts of me are; so it instructs my rep to go sell you an illusion. This is probably not a great way to build friends and influence people.

So let’s explore the alternative. What if I stopped listening to my inner critic and held myself with some compassion? What if I trusted you as being capable of making whatever choices you want to make about me and just let you see me as I really am? Some folks may see this as a sign of weakness and attack, but I haven’t seen that happen in a very long time. And if we develop a solid sense of personal boundaries, we can easily protect ourselves from this type of attack. Some people will not have a clue how to deal with us. They may put on what Jim Mitchell called the “goat face” and stare at us as if they had just encountered an alien from the planet Zork. But strangely and perhaps counter-intuitively, most people will feel safer. When we can see that we share a common humanity, it connects us. Intimacy and compassion are possible. In short, good things happen.

So now to the cool part. Jim has given me permission to take his teachings into the community and Whatcom Community College has given me a green light to teach a class I will call “Ground Rules for a Better Life” this fall. “Fire your rep” is only one of many ground rules and tools Jim taught. Look for my class when the catalog comes out. I hope I see you there.

Truth and Lies

I knew I was in trouble when a grocery store cashier looked at me one day and said, “You’re an engineer, aren’t you?” How did she know? What was there about my persona that branded me as an engineer? I didn’t have a pocket protector, and I didn’t wear horn-rimmed glasses, but my “techie engineer” qualities were apparently tattooed like a bar code on my forehead. Somewhere deep in my psyche, I knew she had not given me a compliment. She had a judgment about engineers and  part of me shared the judgment that engineers were somehow defective as human beings.

Shortly after the cashier scanned my bar code, I had the opportunity to sit in conference with a wonderful bunch of people who were connected with an organization called Earthstewards. Their founder, Danaan Parry, had died of a heart attack a year earlier, and the conference objective was to explore what to do with the organization now that its charismatic leader was no longer there.

I listened intently as one person after another spoke with deep passion about what should happen to the organization. Everyone spoke from their hearts and there was this deep sense of connection developing in the room; but old Engineer Bob was getting confused. I could hear the emotion, but I could not hear not much common sense emerging from all the passion. I could, however, hear common themes. So I went deep into my analytical left brain and was able to sum up all that had been said in the past two hours in about four sentences. There were (at least in my imagination) gasps of awe. “How did you do that?” one person asked. “Wow, that was great!” said another.

For the first time in my life, a bunch of right brained people were giving me feedback that my left brain engineer actually provided value. My inner geek lit up. Way cool!

Looking back on this experience, I realize that I had “bought the lie”. I had taken on the belief that engineers are shallow and geeky and somehow “not as good as regular people”. As I got feedback from the other attendees, I heard that my engineer side had at least some value; but the lie was so deep and had been reinforced so many times that by the late 1990’s I was ready to turn my back entirely on over 30 years of experience as a software developer and become a personal coach. Luckily, a friend of mine asked me, “What do you do without getting paid for it, simply because you love it?”

I realized there were two answers to his question: I do lots of personal growth work, primarily with The Mankind Project, and I write computer programs that help run businesses. Weird combination, but they balance each other out. I realized that the truth about my engineer side is that I know how to build complex database driven software applications, and I like doing it. That side of me can provide useful services to local businesses and keep me from having to stand on the corner with cardboard sign saying “Will code for food”.

Flipping over to the personal growth side, I was on staff for one of the Mankind Project’s “New Warrior Training Adventure” weekends recently and the leader of the weekend asked us, “What’s the lie you tell yourself, and what’s the truth?” It turned out to be a simple but powerful set of questions that have helped me reframe many of my old beliefs. For example, my Dad was a perfectionist. If I brought home a report card with three A’s and a B, his immediate question was, “Why not four A’s?” And when my brother did bring home four A’s, Dad responded, “Why not A+’s?”

As a child, I didn’t understand my father’s intention. All I heard, was “You aren’t good enough.” Only now can the old dog look back and realize that my Dad’s questions weren’t intended to make me feel small. Instead, he wanted to empower me and help me stretch. I know that he was deeply proud of me, but the lie I took on was that “I’m not good enough… I’m not worthy.”

So here’s the new trick: look the lie straight in the eye and see through it to the truth beneath it. The truth is that I am a pretty good man, and as worthy as the next man of being respected and blessed. Owning the lie makes me feel small and weak. Owning the truth fills me up and helps me stand honestly in my adult manhood.

Did I just say “Blessed?” I guess that’s another new trick I have learned… the power of blessing people. All it takes is seeing them and acknowledging the beauty of what I see. I can’t wait for my granddaughter to bring me her first report card. I don’t care what it says because now I know that what she wants from me is very simple. She just wants to be loved and blessed; and old dogs are good at that. Arf!

Old Dog, New Tricks

I turned 61 recently, and although many of my friends tell me that I don’t look my age, I sure feel it. I had to give up skiing a few years ago because my cartilage-deficient knees couldn’t handle the stress, and I cannot backpack anymore because the stenosis in my lower back won’t allow me to carry anything heavier than my laptop without bending me over like Walter Brennan. And for those of you who don’t follow my reference to Walter Brennan, well, you are probably way younger than I am, and your time is coming. But in spite of the tricks I can no longer perform, I have learned a new one that fills me with joy, excitement and a healthy sense of terror.

I have been an entrepreneur of some sort for the better part of 25 years, but I always managed to rig the game so that I was a solo player or I had a partner to share the risks with. Whenever my business needed to hire someone, that responsibility always fell (at least partly) on my partner. I had the game rigged so that I never had to take full responsibility for all aspects of my business. I always had an out, until now.

At the end of 2003, I co-founded DeWaard and Jones Company with Dick DeWaard. True to form, we were 50-50 partners, and all key decisions were made jointly. This had the effect of slowing down our (my) decision making process substantially, but we made pretty good decisions. Unfortunately, however, if we could not agree, nothing happened, and this lead to rising frustration and relationship tension.

By 2007, it was becoming apparent that something needed to shift. Although Dick comes from a family of entrepreneurs (Jake DeWaard, founder of DeWaard and Bode was Dick’s dad), Dick himself had no real stomach for it. So we reached an agreement that allowed Dick to step into an individual contributor role and I stepped up to take full responsibility for running the business, and for paying Dick a healthy premium for his part in helping to make this all happen.

So here I am at 61 and taking full responsibility for my life and my business… for the first time in my life. Now for many of you reading this, that may be a big “So what?” There are over 10,000 small businesses in Whatcom County alone, so I have lots of company. But there is a piece of Jungian “Shadow” here that I want to bring into the light.

In my 40+ years in the computer industry, I have worked for many businesses as an employee and even more as a consultant. I have seen firsthand how dysfunctional most businesses can be and how easy it is to create a win-lose or lose-lose environment that de-motivates and discourages people. The pointy-haired manager in the Dilbert cartoons is someone I know way too well. I have even seen him in my bathroom mirror on too many occasions.

Why is it that such a huge percentage of all businesses seem to be such toxic places to work?

I have been looking at this question for over 20 years now, and I freely admit that much of my interest (or even obsession) with this question goes way back to my family of origin. The difficulties I saw between my parents had a huge impact on me as a child, and I promised myself way back then that I would do everything I could to break this cycle of abuse that seems to infect so many families.

Noble as this goal may seem, I found countless ways to miss the mark and inflict my own personal form of spousal and parental craziness on my wife and children. But I kept working on myself, and slowly I made a deep shift.

I realized many years ago that I was wired with the belief that people with power will abuse that power. I need look no further than the evening news every night to see evidence of the truth of that belief. But I also learned that abusing power is a choice. Often it is not a conscious choice, but it is a choice none-the-less. So power does not have to be abused. It just happens that abusing one’s power is often easier than using it wisely.

So for me to break the chain of abuse, I had lots of work to do; and frankly, I was scared. I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge.

In late 2001, I attended a weekend-long training put on by the Mankind Project called the “New Warrior Training Adventure”. During the training, I realized that my fear of stepping into leadership was a choice that was limiting my experience of life. I was always stepping half-way into leadership, but holding back a full commitment to take personal responsibility for the impact and consequences of my leadership. My fear of abusing power and hurting people limited me and kept me small.

Over the years since that training, I have dedicated thousands of hours to the Mankind Project and they have paid off. I felt my comfort zone expanding and my integrity deepening and my leadership skills growing. I learn to look at my mistakes and accept them without shaming myself. I learned the difference between discernment and judgment and how discernment can serve me and judgment can limit me. But most importantly, I learned to listen deeply to myself.

So now it’s time for some new tricks. I own 100% of my business and I am responsible for making all the choices and taking all of the consequences of those choices. Scary? You bet. But it’s also very empowering. At 61, I have learned that I can still learn and grow. I can still step into new challenges and even learn new tricks. Way cool. Arf!

Safe or Risky?

I had all these plans for the Holiday break. I was going to clean up the garage, update my 2008 budget, sort and cull my massive MP3 collection; but instead, I came down with a cold on Christmas Eve. I don’t do sick well. Can you say, “Grumpy Grandpa?” Of all the goals I set for myself, two had hard deadlines that I had to deliver on. I am scheduled to talk to my Rotary chapter about The Mankind Project on January 8^th, and this article for the Bellingham Business Journal is due in Vanessa Blackburn’s hands by January 4^th. And it is now New Year’s Eve.

I had tried repeatedly to find the muse for this article and failed miserably. Can you say, “Panic rising?” I certainly did not want to let Vanessa down; but I was getting nowhere fast.

Since I was stuck on the BBJ article, I decided to focus instead on my Rotary talk. My first attempt was an utter failure, at least according to my wife and finest critic. She sent me back to the drawing boards only half way through what I had written.

Somewhat humiliated and grumpy (I still have the darn cold), I cut and chopped and got the talk down to its essence: What is the Mankind Project, who started it, what’s it all about, etc. Historical fact. Maybe a bit dry, but nothing if not relatively safe.

I ran the talk past the Rotary program chair (he was seated at the time) and he liked it, but I noticed that he stopped reading half way through. Somehow, our conversation wandered to boats and kids and when we got back to the talk, he reassured me that it would be fine. Rotary members love getting to know their fellow members better, and that’s what the talk would accomplish.

Well, one down, one to go; but I still had no clue of what to write about for Vanessa.

About a week ago, I sent out an email request on one of the Mankind Project email lists asking for help with the Rotary talk from other men who may have made similar presentations. I got one short email with some information about the local history of MKP, but other than that, the silence was scary. Had my email stopped working?

Tonight, the very last evening of the year, I got an email from another Mankind Project member in Rochester, NY telling me he had been through the same experience I was anticipating, and that he had felt the same anxiety I was feeling. He told me how he approached his talk, and I found myself mesmerized by his ideas; but they were very risky. Instead of talking about the history of MKP, he asked the audience, “How many of you are divorced? How many of you have children who are divorced or separated? How many have of you have siblings or friends who were divorced or separated? How many of you have experienced some sort of loss, breakup or breakdown of an important relationship?”

By this time, pretty much everyone had their hand up. He had their attention. Then he asked the audience to tell him what are some of the things that break up relationships. They answered with things like “Communication breakdown, lack of intimacy and trust, inability to listen to each other,” and the list grew rapidly.

He shared his own history of difficulties with his wife and children, and the impact that his work with The Mankind Project had had on him. He told them a few relevant details about the New Warrior Training Adventure that is MKP’s flagship training, and about the growth that had happened inside him by sitting in circle with other men on a regular basis and examining his life. He talked about how his relationship with his children had transformed and how deeply they connected with him now. He didn’t sugar coat anything. He was open and vulnerable with his fellow Rotarians.

His approach was scary and risky. If I use that approach, I run the risk of making many people in my audience quite uncomfortable, and these are people I must live and work with on a daily basis. I am not a trained counselor; to the contrary, I am a computer programmer who spends most of his time lost in software design problems. I am not at all sure I can pull this off with the same grace and honesty that my friend did; but I have made a decision. I am going to ask my fellow Rotarians to decide whether I give the safe talk or the risky one. Do I play it safe and tell them the history of MKP and the New Warrior Training Adventure or do I step into my fears and ask myself and my fellow Rotarians to take a risk?

Which choice do you think they will make?

Binder Mania

 When I took full ownership of my business, I had absolutely no clue how many projects and tasks would require my attention. I am only beginning to get a clue now, and I often feel overwhelmed and stressed by all the things I feel the need to keep track of. I have never been very good at remembering things like phone numbers and anniversaries, so I write things down. I use a simple journal I purchased at a local bookstore for about $7.00 and write everything in it. Lists of things to do this week, ideas, poetry, introspection; they all go in my journal. I am on my seventh one now, and the journals work well for me, but they do have limitations… like finding something I wrote down awhile ago. So I am constantly inventing new systems.

One I have used quite well for years is the “clean up your desk in five minutes flat” system. My desk will tend to get cluttered with piles of paper. When it gets to the point where I have difficulty finding something, it never takes me more than five minutes to clean it up. Here’s the system:

• Rapidly stack all the papers in a single pile. No reading; just pile everything into a single pile and declare psychological victory over the space. I now have a mostly clean desk and one gnarly pile of papers. Gloating is permissible for a few seconds as you actually see the top of your desk for what may be the first time in years for some of you. If you have too much paper to fit into a single pile, multiple piles are allowed. The key here is to smash everything into a single heap without looking at any of the papers. That comes next.
• Process the pile one item at a time and put each item into one of five piles. I’m a simple guy with only five fingers; hence five piles. The key to this step is to make your decision quickly. Don’t process the item beyond the simple decision of which pile it goes into:

1. Read – stuff I want to read but haven’t gotten around to.
2. File – stuff I want to keep, but don’t need to do anything with
3. Do – stuff that requires action by me
4. Trash – stuff I can let go of (recycling works well with this pile)
5. Hand off – items I can dump on someone else to handle.

• I now take the Read pile and stick it in with all the other articles I have deluded myself into thinking I will actually read. I have a basket in the bathroom for this pile. If you are an inveterate reader, here’s your homework.
• The File Pile goes into a banker box along with the results other papers I would really like to keep, but don’t know what to do with. Once the box is full, put the lid on, mark the date and seal it. If it is still sealed a year later, recycle the whole box. After years of using this process, I have learned that “File” is a different way to spell “Trash”.
• The “Trash” and “Hand-off” piles are pretty self-evident. If something really needs to be filed, the hand-off method works well, but it requires someone who will actually file it. My wife and I have been handing off papers at home for years because neither of us has the patience to file things.
• The “Do” pile is now a fraction of the mess that used to take up my whole desk, but it occupies the rest of this treatise on organizational self-discipline.

Although it takes me only a few minutes to get to the heart of the do-do, I found that I keep seeing the same darn papers over and over again. The “Getting Things Done” folks offer the rule-of-thumb, “If it will take less than two minutes to do this, do it now.” That actually works pretty well; but what about the rest of the stuff?

One thing I have learned about myself is that if I put something into a file and stick the file into a drawer, I will never see it again. It must stay on top of my desk for it to remain in my life. I know that some of you will think this is a profound character defect, but as my hero, Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations,” and that’s one of mine.

So I started putting things into binders and keeping an increasing number of binders on my desktop. I have a binder for Goals, Plans, Marketing, Sales, Financials, Infrastructure, Contact Lists, People I Know in Bellingham (is your card in this one?) and a bunch more. Inside the cover of many of them, there is a simple form I devised with three columns:

 

The Domain is the name of the binder (Marketing, Financials, etc.)  Contrary to the example above, I don’t type the action items in – I write them so I am free to scribble whatever I want on the page. And it’s quicker.

Now, If I have to do something Sales related, I open the sales binder, write in the action item, and if there is some associated paperwork, I file it in the binder. In the Sales binder, I don’t use tabs. In the Financials binder, I have tabs for each month. In the People binder, the tabs are A…Z.

How well does this work? I’ll know better in six months. In the mean time, what systems do you use to manage the chaos in your life? Email me your “Chaos Killer System” and let me share it with others. Maybe some other old dogs can learn some new tricks!