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:

Action List		Domain: Writing
Status	Action		Due
¨	Write Old Dog, New Tricks		3/4/8
¨

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!

Monday, January 21, 2008 10:15:23 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  Old Dog, New Tricks | Small Busines Owner

The Second Time Around

It occurred to me in the shower tonight that there is a piece of history in the name, "The Socrates Group" that may take explaining. If you carefully examine my resume, you will see that I was the founder and president of The Socrates Group from 1991 to 1999 it was acquired by Etelos Corporation.

I became one of seven founders of Etelos and stayed with them until September, 2000 when I had to lay everyone off except Ahmad Baitalmal, the finest programmer I have ever known. We had raised a couple million when the Internet reality pie hit everyone in the face in March, 2000. The money dried up overnight and by August, it was clear that a thorough retrenching was in order. I laid myself off with most everyone else, but Ahmad stayed on, along with the three Kolke brothers lead by Danny, the youngest and the one with the passion and leadership that started the whole thing.

Danny is a pretty amazing fellow. He is a world class piano player, and a man who simply doesn't quit. He and his brothers Ray and Desmond hung on and Etelos is back with a vengeance. Etelos has had more lives than the luckiest of cats. It started in 1999 as a sales training company. It then mutated into a referral selling tool. Now it is behind CRM For Google and a gaggle of other tools to support the sales process.

We started Etelos in June and I hired Ahmad in November. Ahmad is about 6’6” and was at the time close to 400 pounds. Physically, he is huge, but he is one of the gentlest people I know. He was born in Saudi Arabia and taught himself English by listening to the radio. To listen to him now, you would never know that he is not a native born American.

Ahmad is the genius behind all of Etelos transformation over the years. He created the engine at the heart of Etelos’ technology. Danny is the promoter. He is a low-key introvert who is one of the best salesmen I have ever seen. But most of all, Danny and Ahmad have demonstrated persistence. They simply hung in through the toughest of times and now show all the signs of being an overnight sensation.

I left in 2000 because I could clearly see that Ahmad was more critical to Etelos’ survival than I was. That was one of my best decisions ever, at least for Danny and Ahmad. But now, seven years later, I have changed the name of the business I started three years ago with Dick DeWaard from DeWaard and Jones to The Socrates Group.

Moving back in time, I started The Socrates Group (Version 1) in 1991 after I left Microsoft Consulting Services. I taught a course called “New Architectures For Enterprise Computing” all over North America and even twice in Caracas, Venezuela. I taught at Intel, AT&T, the US Army and I taught hundreds of KPMG’s consultants about advanced computing concepts and architectures. It was great fun and I met thousands of great people.

The Socrates Group was me and my wife, Donna, working out of our house in Redmond. I traveled about two and a half weeks each month and learned my way around just about every airport in America. I learned to evaluate a hotel room in less than 10 seconds. I was a true Road Warrior. I even have the fleece jacket to prove it. I got great evaluations and loved teaching; but after seven years, the travel got quite boring and I longed to roll up my sleeves and dive back into the programming trenches. Enter Danny Kolke.

After leaving Etelos, I walked through the valley of the shadows of the Internet melt-down, the earthquake of early 2001 and the realization that there was a golden (but scary) opportunity in the midst of the chaos of those times.

Donna and I had never felt at home in Redmond. After much thought and investigation and a slap up side of the head from our eldest son, Travis, we realized that Bellingham had all the qualities of the place we wanted to settle down except good paying jobs. We set our sights on unloading our house in Redmond in the middle of a housing slump and chased the market downward through 9/11 and into November, 2001 until we finally sold it for a huge discount over what it was worth a year later.

I had made a practice of coming to Bellingham at least one day a week from June through December simply to meet people. By the time we arrived in our massive U-Haul truck at 10:00AM on January second, 2002, we had a pretty good idea of what Bellingham was like. Donna had a job within two weeks, but it took me six months before I landed a job with Office Systems Northwest. Ron Taylor hired me, but could never quite figure out what to do with me. I wasn’t cut from the hard-core salesman model that were his roots, and I wasn’t very good at (or interested in) fixing computers. I realized pretty quickly that if I wanted to make a decent living in Bellingham, I would have to start my own business.

I stayed with OSNW until the end of 2003 when Dick and I started DeWaard and Jones. When Dick and I decided in the spring of 2007 that it made good sense for me to buy out his shares in the business, I knew that we had to change the name. “DeWaard and Jones” was a pun on DeWaard and Bode (started by Dick’s father), but it wasn’t a very good or useful pun. Most often, people thought were some sort of financial services company.

It took me many brainstorming meetings with Syd Cole and Kate Clark before I finally realized that it was time to return to my roots and revive The Socrates Group, the second time around. So if you wondered about that apparent déjà view in my resume, now you know the story.

Thursday, November 08, 2007 12:32:36 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  Small Busines Owner

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!

Originally published in the October, 2007 edition of the Bellingham Business Journal. Republished here by permission. Link: http://www.thebellinghambusinessjournal.com/october2007/jones.php

Saturday, September 29, 2007 11:38:33 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  Humanity | Small Busines Owner

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!

Originally published in the September, 2007 edition of the Bellingham Business Journal. Republished here by permission. Link: http://www.thebellinghambusinessjournal.com/september2007/jones.php

Monday, July 16, 2007 11:35:56 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  Humanity | Old Dog, New Tricks | Small Busines Owner