I am currently on the metro going downtown to work. Its jammed pack… And every newspaper within eyes reach is fixed on the “style” and “celebrity” news section. If people in this backwards-ass (not a good backwards this time) country we live in spent half the time they spend talking about celebrities on talking about what’s going on in there own life, maybe all of us could improve just enough to make a positive impact on the world.

Ken Hendricks passed away Friday. Hendricks proved that you don’t have to approach life in the usual manor in order to be truly successful at what you do. I love the following quote from Ken Hendricks, (pulled from Inc. magazine’s blog post):

A high school dropout, Hendricks learned the roofing trade from his father and eventually founded a wholesale roofing distributing business that turned over $3 billion in business a year with 6,000 employees and 390 locations.

“Whatever you do, do the best you can and never set a limit on how far you can go,” Hendricks told Inc. magazine last December. “It doesn’t matter what you do. It’s always fun if you’re successful.”

Its always been in the back of my mind that Google would be a great place to have a career. The ideal scenario would be to work for Google as the “Director of Other“. The description goes on to give a little detail into the idea behind the 10 percent of time that Google employees are encouraged to work on whatever projects they feel will improve the company.

The reason I love this practice by Google so much is not necessarily the idea that the 10% of time an employee works on his/her own ideas for the company will change the company as a whole, but more because it reminds the employees that they are actually able to think and have input into the future of the company.

I have to link to this site… It would just be wrong not to. http://www.womma.org/

So my problem right now is that I have a tough time focusing on problems.  In other words, my brain is so tightly focused on finding solutions to problems that well, I never really focus my energy on finding out exactly what the problem is and the extent of the problem is that I am trying to solve.

I just figured out that I have this problem of not knowing my problem while working on my business plan.  As I may have mentioned earlier, I am bulleting the sections that I need to write for the plan before I hunker down and actually begin writing the sections in full detail.  Well, looking back at my bullets, I have about 2 pages worth of bullets under the “Solution” section but only a few simple bullets for the “Problem” section.  This inspired me to take action on figuring out exactly what the problem is that I am solving with my new business.   Here are the methods that I am going to try and utilize:

• Research on trade association and specific web forums, looking for clues that indicate an organization is facing the problem I seek to solve
• Meeting individuals in the industry to discuss the issues they have.
•  Find competitors that are supposedly trying to solve the same problem that we are solving, and figure out their description of the issue (marketing materials, etc..)

If you have any other ways that I might be able to find ways to describing the problem organizations face that I seek to solve, then please leave a comment and I will add them to my grand-old-list…

There is one way to find out. In an effort to keep myself focused on a particular business idea (my wife complains because I have to many of them, I think the complaints stem from her having to listen to the nitty-gritty details of each of them), I have promised myself that I would religiously blog about my processes for the next 81 days. Day one will start at midnight tonight, were I will begin to plan out the schedule that I hope to follow within the next 81 days. More on the schedule to come…

I invite you to forget everything you have ever learned about business throughout your years and take a fresh look at the way you operate in the business world, the way industries are run, and the way we use technology in our daily lives. Why?

We often take for granted that the fundamentals we learn for a particular subject area are solid ground on which to continue building our knowledge. My only concern with this mindset is that business, technology and industry are not fundamentally operating the same way the operated 10 years ago.

What we need to do is to go on a journey of forgetting everything we have learned thus far and starting fresh; building a new and modern foundation on which to continue our education on, and then come to accept that to continue to grow we will eventually have to forget everything and start over again.

These fundamentals do not include typical business rules. Typical business rules equate to typical returns, typical industry placement, and typical products.

This blog is not about constantly sizing up your competition, instead it is about ignoring your competition and focusing all your energy on your customers.

This blog is not about traditional system development life cycles that have clearly defined requirements. It’s about new development life cycles that allow for constant change in requirements as the needs of customers change.

This blog is not about working your way into an industry, its about reshaping the industry your working in for improvement.