12/21/04 12/21/04

Huge Anouncement: LexThink! Chicago

LexThink! Chicago: Building the Perfect Firm.

What do you get when you bring together a select group of innovative, big-thinking people from the worlds of law, business, technology, marketing, and consulting for a full day and ask them to design the perfect professional service firm?

We call it LexThink! Chicago.

Innovate. On April 3, 2005, we will turn the Catalyst Ranch space in downtown Chicago into laboratory space for a group of innovators and thought leaders. We'll create and test ideas for transforming the delivery of professional services, to better match the needs of professionals and their clients alike. With a full day of targeted presentations, small group discussions, collaborative brainstorming and other exercises, we will will mix innovative business practices with proven client service strategies and promising technology applications to create the formula for the perfect professional services firm. The focus of every conversation will be on turning talk into action, and bold ideas into realities

Motivate. Attendees will take away dozens of practice-changing ideas while making many new friends. LexThink! Chicago will be a chance to meet in person bloggers, authors and speakers that have motivated and challenged us over the years. Spending a day with this group will generate renewed energy and enthusiasm and give you a new action list for making the changes you want in your practice, your business and your life.

Activate. In too many cases, the surge of enthusiasm from an inspirational conference drains away steadily as you return to the real world. LexThink! Chicago is designed to create extended relationships, with opportunities for structured feedback and continuing discussions, social support, and ongoing motivation to transform your practice. The collaborative experience will continue with ongoing discussion groups, monthly conference calls and other ways to connect with LexThink! alumni.

LexThink! Chicago is the brainchild of well-known lawyer bloggers Matthew Homann, Dennis Kennedy and Scheherazade Fowler, who have been thinking (and blogging) about ways to make meaningful changes in their professional practices. LexThink! Chicago grew out of one of their brainstorming sessions and their own “what if” questions.

To permit meaningful participation, to generate the best conversations, and to work within the limitations of the creative space we've reserved, participation in the first LexThink! Chicago will be by invitation-only. We’re limiting it to a select group of professional service providers—lawyers, accountants, consultants, strategists, coaches, technologists, marketers and entrepreneurs. If you are interested -- or know someone who might be -- get in touch with us soon by e-mailing Matt Homann at homann@gmail.com. We will send out the invitations before the end of December, so make sure you let us know about your interest as soon as you can. We are seeking sponsors for LexThink! Chicago and expect to set the registration fee at less than $200 per attendee.

Many people always ask “Why?” There are also some who ask “Why not?” We’re the second kind. How about you?

12/17/04 12/17/04

The Magic of Recurring Payments

Here is a great post from another of my favorite new blogs, PsychoTactics.

This year for the first time ever, the yoga teacher has been able to take a break.

Not for a week, or two weeks, but for a whole month. And all the while there is a steady flow of income coming through the door, despite the class being shut. That's changed from last year?

The answer is: Recurring Payments.

You may not think it's a big deal but there's some part of your business, if not a major part of your business that could be continuously fed by a recurring system.

Lawn mowing services do the recurring thingy.
Fancy membership clubs do the recurring thingy.
And so do a lot of businesses.

Of course the yoga teacher is going to replace the one month away by giving goodies away to his class. But in essence, for the first time ever, that yoga teacher is getting a break. Some time to breathe. And all because he's put a recurring system in place.

You should too. Right away.

12/17/04 12/17/04

Law Professor Evaluations

I teach a law school class (Pre-Trial Practice and Procedure) at Washington University Law School. I generally enjoy the experience and have almost always had great students. This year was no exception.

Near the end of every semester, the teacher is asked to leave the room and the students fill out course evaluations. I don’t know how many other professors read them, but I do. In fact, I’ve learned quite a bit from reading the students’ comments and have changed my teaching style based upon some of the criticisms I’ve received. As helpful as the current evaluations are, I’d really like to read the responses to these questions from Jeremy’s Revised Course Evaluation Form:

Section I. Please rate the following on a scale from one (virtually none) to five (really quite high).

1. Odds you’re getting called on in any given class.
2. Odds you’ve done the reading
3. Chance the professor actually thinks he/she’s lecturing to a bunch of colleagues, who already know as much as he/she does about the subject.
4. Chance the professor actually wrote his/her most recent book.
5. Ease of online shopping while still catching enough of what the professor is saying so as to not feel completely lost.
6. Probability you’d be seeking emancipation if you found out the professor was your parent / grandparent
7. Amount of audiovisual equipment used.
8. Amount of food provided throughout the course of the semester.
9. Unpleasant professor odor.
10. Chance you’d take the class again, knowing everything you know now, except the material itself, because if you knew that, then taking the class again would be pretty silly, wouldn’t it?

Section II. Please answer with a percentage estimate between 0 and 100.

1. Percent of classes you have attended.
2. Percent of classes you wish you’d attended
3. Percent of students, on average, who return after the 5-minute break in the middle, if applicable.
4. Percent of students, on average, who fall asleep during any given session, with 10 extra percentage points added if there is regularly snoring heard throughout the room.
5. Percent of time you believe the professor has prepared for class.
6. Percent of time you believe that if the professor has in fact prepared for class, the professor needs some help in the “preparing for class” department.
7. Percent of time spent basically reading from the assigned materials.
8. Percent of time spent basically reading from unassigned materials.
9. Percent of time spent reading from the Bible.
10. Percent of your total net worth you would pay to have all memory of this class erased from your mind.

Section III. Open-ended questions. Please print neatly.

1. Is the professor funny? Give examples.
2. Do gunners seem to gravitate toward this class? Name them. We’ll get them.
3. Draw your best imitation of the professor’s blackboard penmanship, with an emphasis on illustrating the degree of legibility.
4. Would you recommend this class to your friends?
5. Would you recommend this class to your enemies?
6. Would you recommend this class be exported to Yale?

Section IV. Bizarre and Unrelated Logic Game.

John has Con Law on Monday and Tuesday. Katie has Corps on Wednesday and Thursday. Bill has Tax, but he can’t remember what days, since he never even bought the book. Susan signed up for a seminar, but wishes she didn’t since there’s so much reading. Classes that meet on Wednesday never conflict with The West Wing. Which class has the hardest exam?

Now, if any of my students are reading this and thinking about answering these questions for my class, remember, I haven’t turned in your grades yet!

12/15/04 12/15/04

Vote for Me as one of America's Top 20 Legal Thinkers

Legal Affairs Magazine is looking for the country's twenty most influential and important legal thinkers. I would have nominated Dennis Kennedy, but he doesn't think much of the list, so instead, I'm nominating myself.

Today, I proudly announce my candidacy for the position of Influential and Important Legal Thinker. Though the nominations have closed, there is a place on the ballot for a write-in candidate (remember, my name is spelled "HOMANN").

So vote early, vote often, and vote Homann!

One more thing, I'm going to need a campaign manager. Rick, are you free?

Oh, and if you want to support me, I've got this great button you can put on your site.

On a semi-serious note, bloggers have accomplished some pretty amazing things. Wouldn't it be cool to have one of our own (even if it is me) named as a more influential legal thinker than Clarance Thomas?

P.S. I can't afford a nanny, so I think I'm pretty safe there.

11/22/04 11/22/04

Baseball's Lessons for Lawyers

Great post by Jeff Angus over at Management by Baseball about how the Minnesota Twins have incorporated a new innovative way to price their season tickets by using flexible vouchers. In short, Twins fans can buy vouchers for game tickets (each priced $2.00 less than normal ticket price). If a fan buys the minimum of 40 vouchers, they can go alone to 40 games, take a friend to 20, three others to 10, etc. Each time the vouchers can be used for different seats, on an “as available” basis.

When I first read about the Twins’ plan, I started to think about how lawyers could use a similar voucher plan in their offices. We are talking to a few of our clients about offering estate-planning vouchers they can pass on as gifts to adult children, friends, parents, employees, etc. Each voucher is good for two wills, and powers of attorney for health care and property. We’ll offer the vouchers at a slightly lower cost than our normal flat rate for the services. In the event a person needs more significant estate planning, we’ll apply the value of the voucher towards our normal fee for that service. If this year’s trial run goes well, we will offer all of our clients the vouchers beginning next year.

At the end of his post, Jeff sounds like he is speaking directly to lawyers, when he shares some of his own experience with “out of the box” thinking:

It's amazing sometimes how rigidly a seller will adhere to a delivery scheme through inertia, even when the model has always been broken.

I worked for a swell software company where one of the highest-margin products it had was a product that could not be used by a single user. The fewest people this networked program could use was two. The buying of a single unit would only be for an upgrade (where an existing set of users needed to add another user). Dozens of times every week, technical support received phone calls from people who had just bought one unit and couldn't do anything with it (imagine instant messaging where you're the only person who has it).

Resistance to change was overwhelming. They had always sold 1-packs. It didn't matter that a 2-pack required only another registration key (a slip of paper with another number on it), and would therefore cost about 15 cents more to make while nearly doubling the asking price, never mind it would cut down on angry or confused (or both) customers and those customers' wrath directed at clueless resellers and our own technical support. And this was software, not something hard to package like a power-drill or a workbench or a piece of furniture -- it was a book, a pamphlet, a card with a number on it and a disc. No-one needed to design new packaging.

It took over a year to even get the idea discussed. Ugly, but not unusual.

Decisions as to what to put in the box usually stem from earlier wisdom that was actually wise. The wisdom then loses some of its value over time, but systems and the people who run them fall into patterns they don't want to change.

The Twins woke up and tried something different from what teams have been doing since their executives started working in baseball.

Shouldn't you?

Indeed.

11/17/04 11/17/04

The Dream Firm

Jessamyn West at librarian.net has this post about her dream library. Two of her suggestions:

We'd be open when people wanted to use the library, not just when librarians wanted to work. How would we know? We'd ask them. [some surveys: here, here, here and here]
In my library, we'd fix your computer for you. We'd work the information booth at your event. We'd answer your questions any time and any place, not just when you come to us and wait at the reference desk for us to be free. We'd save your time, even if it sometimes meant sacrificing our own.

I've been thinking about how the dream law office (or any professional services firm) would look and operate -- if it were designed by clients. Any ideas?

11/9/04 11/9/04

Clutter is Never Free

Knowledge@Wharton has this great article with a conversation with one of the authors of Conquering Complexity in Your Business. Some excerpts:

Complexity is a systemic effect that accumulates over time. So while you may have a perfect portfolio today, your customers' tastes are changing—what's good today is probably not good tomorrow. Many businesses respond by expanding their portfolio and placing more goods or services on the market. Each innovation may represent a source of customer value and profits at the time that it is introduced, but unless you have some mechanism for rebalancing that portfolio, complexity will creep into your processes, tax internal systems, and drive up costs. Even worse, you might strangle growth in the name of pursuing customer value.

Also, it consumes resources and can impede growth. If you have a portfolio of 4,000 products, you're spreading your marketing resources across all those products, when you should be concentrating on core brands. We also find in our work that companies with a complex product or service line have a significant gap in their understanding of what truly drives their profitability. What's important is that companies understand the relationships between complexity, cost, efficiency and growth, which we captured in a concept called the Complexity Equation. Management can then make rational decisions with these relationships being explicit, instead of implicit or unknown.

As a general practitioner, this article hits a bit close to home.

11/9/04 11/9/04

Budgeting for High Risk Ideas

I've written before about how much I like the Report 103 Newsletter from the JPB Group. Today's issue (check here in few days for the archived version) suggested implementing a High Risk Idea Budget:

Some radical new ideas are so obviously brilliant that you can implement them and watch the money roll in. But these ideas are few and far between. Most radical ideas are highly risky. If they work, they might put your company way ahead of the competition and establish your firm as a market leader; or they might slash 25% off your operational costs; or they might cost your company an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, a lot of companies do not implement their hottest ideas precisely for this risk factor. Although everyone in the company loves the idea, the CFO reviews the numbers and says it is just too risky to contemplate.

Clearly, of course, no company should put the entire enterprise at risk. However, every company can and should establish a high risk budget for implementing radical ideas. This might represent five percent of the operational budget or 25%. It depends on the company and the market.

By defining a part of the budget for risky projects, you give your company an opportunity to implement the most exciting ideas. Many will fail. But a few will work. And a small number will be real winners that will repay your high risk ideas budget many times over.

Moreover, granting an employee – or a team of employees - a portion of your high risk idea budget can be a powerful reward (see previous story on rewarding innovation).

The primary point of resistance many firms seem to have to dumping the billable hour is that it may turn out to be unprofitable. Why not set aside a certain number of clients (or an attorney or two) to implement some alternative billing strategies?

11/4/04 11/4/04

The History of Ideas

I talk a lot about ideas here, and even sold quite a few at my garage sale a few weeks back. I wonder what I would have gotten for this, the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Set aside a few hours and peruse this unbelievable digital version of Philip P. Wiener's book from the early 70's, "The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas." Really great reading.

11/3/04 11/3/04

The Law Office Experience

Innovation.net points to a best practices study by The Product Development & Management Association (PDMA) comparing performance and practices of over 400 companies and industries. According to the study (as reported by Innovation.net)

Not surprisingly from the 2004 study,"the best" performers generate 49% of their profits from new products -- more than twice as much as "the rest". Top performers recognize the incremental value that successful new products provide to customers and therefore to the bottom line.

How many new "products" have most professional service providers come up with in the last year? The last decade?

11/2/04 11/2/04

The Chinese Advantage

From the Canadian Globe and Mail comes this article: From Cells to Bells, 10 Things the Chinese Do Far Better Than We Do. Some great food for thought. Some highlights:

2. Informative stop lights

In Tianjin, a city of 13 million people, traffic lights display red or green signals in a rectangle that rhythmically shrinks down as the time remaining evaporates. In Beijing, some traffic lights offer a countdown clock for both green and red signals.

During a red light, you know whether you have time to check that map; on a green light, you know whether to start braking a block away -- or to stomp on the accelerator, as though you were a Toronto or Montreal driver. (That's probably why Montreal has a few lights with countdown seconds for pedestrians.)

4. Adult playgrounds

Hate paying those gym club bills? Loathe huffing and puffing around buff bodies in spandex? Beijing provides free outdoor exercise equipment in neighbourhoods throughout the city: walking machines, ab flexers, weight machines and rowing machines in bright reds, blues, yellows and greens.

Adult playgrounds get everyone out in the fresh air, especially seniors who might stay shut in at home. Teens like to hang out there, too. And it sends a not-so-subtle propaganda message about the benefits of healthy living.

6. Daily banking

We feel so lucky when a bank branch in Canada opens for a few hours on Saturday mornings. (Notice the long, long lines?) But Chinese banks are now open 9 to 5, seven days a week. Even on New Year's Day and other national holidays, at least some branches will open for business. The ones that are closed post helpful notices directing you to the closest open branch. And, yes, they do have a full network of ATMs.

7. Wireless service bells

Trying to flag down your waiter for a glass of water? Just press a made-in-China gizmo at your table. Your table number lights up on a panel inside the kitchen and your server is soon hovering by your side. The bell also eliminates that annoying waiterly interruption: "Is everything all right?"

The same gizmo in spas alerts masseuses when you're demurely under the sheet and ready for their attention.

10. Free hemming

This doesn't count as cheap labour because only three people service an entire department store. In Canada, hemming a new pair of trousers adds at least $10 to the cost, plus two trips to the tailor. And you have to try them on again while you get measured.

At the No. 1 Department Store in Shanghai, the salesclerk measures you while you are trying on the pants, asking: "Will you be wearing these with high heels or flats?" If you decide to buy them, she scribbles the length on your receipt. You head to what looks like a gift-wrapping station where a man measures and chalks the pants, scissors off the surplus and flings them to two women behind him. One hems the raw edge on a machine and tosses it to the other, who stitches the final hem on another machine and presses them.

Even with two customers ahead of me, I swear it took under three minutes in all to get two pairs back.

When I tell the woman ahead of me that stores in Canada don't do this, she's astonished. "Really?" she says. "How inconvenient."

10/31/04 10/31/04

The Creativity Conundrum

Why aren't lawyers more creative? Not creative about solving client problems, but creative about being lawyers. Here is an exercise: Walk down any aisle of any new grocery store and notice how many products are there that didn't even exist ten years ago. Heck, just look around at the store itself and see how different the shopping experience has become in just the last decade. Now, look at the legal profession. Any new products? Do our offices look different? Have we changed in any meaningful way how we provide our services or interact with clients (apart from e-mail) in the last ten years? Name another industry or business that has so systematically avoided innovation and shown such a disdain for new ideas.

I had a meeting on Saturday morning with another attorney and we were talking about our respective practices. He does nothing but personal injury and I've sent him quite a few cases. I shared with him some of the things I was implementing in my practice and he remarked how "creative" I was. I responded that every lawyer I know is pretty creative when solving client problems, but that creativity (or ability to think differently) doesn't translate into high-level thinking about changing the way they approach the business of law.

The discussion reminded me about an article from Psychology Today titled "The Art of Creativity." There is a lot of great stuff on creativity in the article, but the part that caught my eye was the list of ways to discourage creativity in children:

Surveillance: hovering over kids, making them feel that they're constantly being watched while they're working.
Evaluation: making kids worry about how others judge what they are doing. Kids should be concerned primarily with how satisfied they-and not others-are with their accomplishments.
Competition: putting kids in a win/lose situation, where only one person can come out on top. A child should be allowed to progress at his own rate.
Overcontrol: telling kids exactly how to do things. This leaves children feeling that any exploration is a waste of time.
Pressure: establishing grandiose expectations for a child's performance. Training regimes can easily backfire and end up instilling an aversion for the subject being taught.

The article also fingers a bit more subtle culprit: time.

Children more naturally than adults enter that ultimate state of creativity called flow. In flow, time does not matter; there is only the timeless moment at hand. It is a state that is more comfortable for children than adults, who are more conscious of the passage of time.
"One ingredient of creativity is open-ended time," says Ann Lewan, a director of the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, D.C. "Children have the capacity to get lost in whatever they're doing in a way that is much harder for an adult. They need the opportunity to follow their natural inclinations, their own particular talents, to go wherever their proclivities lead them."

Now, how many of these "creativity killers" are applicable to lawyers? Can you name any law firm associate that doesn't experience all of them nearly every day? Is the answer to the question that started this post that our prevalent business model wrings all the creativity out of our lawyers in their first few years of practice? If so, what can we do to stop it?

I've got some ideas, and I'm going to be posting a lot more on the legal creativity conundrum in the next few weeks.

10/28/04 10/28/04

Why has ketchup stayed the same?

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and the upcoming Blink (which I can't wait to read), wrote an article titled The Ketchup Conundrum for the September issue of The New Yorker. In the piece, he discusses how Grey Poupon paved the way for the hundreds of varieties of mustard we see in our supermarkets today, and suggests that ketchup may be next.

However, my favorite part of the article is Gladwell's explanation of how Prego (the spaghetti sauce) developed their extra-chunky sauce:

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers--even spaghetti lovers--know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. "The mind," as Moskowitz is fond of saying, "knows not what the tongue wants." Instead, working with the Campbell’s kitchens, he came up with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce. These were designed to differ in every conceivable way: spiciness, sweetness, tartness, saltiness, thickness, aroma, mouth feel, cost of ingredients, and so forth. He had a trained panel of food tasters analyze each of those varieties in depth. Then he took the prototypes on the road--to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jacksonville--and asked people in groups of twenty-five to eat between eight and ten small bowls of different spaghetti sauces over two hours and rate them on a scale of one to a hundred. When Moskowitz charted the results, he saw that everyone had a slightly different definition of what a perfect spaghetti sauce tasted like. If you sifted carefully through the data, though, you could find patterns, and Moskowitz learned that most people’s preferences fell into one of three broad groups: plain, spicy, and extra-chunky, and of those three the last was the most important. Why? Because at the time there was no extra-chunky spaghetti sauce in the supermarket. Over the next decade, that new category proved to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Prego. "We all said, ‘Wow!’ " Monica Wood, who was then the head of market research for Campbell’s, recalls. "Here there was this third segment--people who liked their spaghetti sauce with lots of stuff in it--and it was completely untapped. So in about 1989-90 we launched Prego extra-chunky. It was extraordinarily successful."

What untapped market is there for your services? Can you find the unserved segment and be its "extra-chunky" Prego?

10/28/04 10/28/04

Life Laundry for Law Offices

I don't get BBC America at home, but have heard about the show Life Laundry, and thought it had an interesting premise:

In Life Laundry, storage expert Dawna Walter helps people streamline their internal and external lives by cleaning out their clutter and offering advice, insight and top tips – while antique dealer Mark Franks help turn junk into hard cash – all in 48 hours.

But this is more than just a home makeover show. For some it's an incredibly emotional experience as they struggle to come to terms with the past.

Faced with rooms too full of junk for their owners to use, to broken computers and washing machines that have sat idle for years, Dawna and Mark take drastic action, emptying the offending rooms on to the closest outside space.

Step-by-step they take the homeowners through their belongings sifting, sorting, and slinging out the clutter that has taken over their homes – and in some cases their lives.

From people who have allowed their possessions to take over as a result of trauma, to sentimental hoarders, over-zealous collectors and people and families whose relationships are under strain from the amount of junk cluttering their homes – the Life Laundry experts are on hand to help.

What would the Life Laundry experts find in your office? Old computers, printers that don't work, dozens (hundreds, thousands) of books that you don't use anymore? Piles of trade publications and legal magazines that you've set aside to read someday? Get rid of all of that stuff and be amazed at how little you really needed any of it.

10/28/04 10/28/04

Ergonomics for Everyone

I'm pretty happy with my actual working environment. I alternate between my Aeron and Leap chairs, have a cord-less keyboard and mouse, and use two monitors. Though the ergonomics of my situation could be improved slightly (maybe by throwing in some feng shui ), I feel comfortable when I work.

It seems that work comfort was on the mind of New Zealand's Occupation Safety and Health Service when they passed these ergonomic guidelines for the workers in the nation's now-legal sex trade:

Beds and workstations should support the worker’s back and allow for services to be performed without strain or discomfort.
Beds and massage tables should be adjustable to allow employees to use them without strain.
Employees should be trained for safe use of equipment and techniques.
Workers’ clothing should be comfortable and should not affect the employee’s posture.
Workers should take breaks between shifts and clients to avoid stress and fatigue.
Workers should alternate between repetitive and non-repetitive activities.

Certainly some good tips here for all us workers in the "service" business.

10/27/04 10/27/04

Innovation for Lawyers

I've been talking to some really smart people lately, and have been running an idea past them that I've blogged about before -- a conference on innovation for lawyers. The goal would be to provide attendees with both the ideas and the tools to incorporate innovation into their practices, and to give them specific things to implement when they get back to the office.

Now for the agenda:

In the morning, I want several interesting people (preferably non-lawyers) to talk about innovation in their fields. I'd like to see authors, marketing gurus, creativity consultants, entrepreneurs, and even CEO's of small companies tell the audience about the newest and coolest ways they are changing how they do business. In the afternoon, we'd brainstorm about specific ways the "big picture" ideas could translate to the attendees' individual practices.

If this seems really cool to you, let me know if you'd like to attend. Also, if there is anything you'd like to see, drop me a line as well. Time and place are Chicago the Sunday after Techshow (April 3, 2005). If the interest is there, I'll follow up with more information.

10/27/04 10/27/04

Can blogs make you an expert on everything?

I received this e-mail yesterday:

Matt,

I hope this email finds you doing well. Are you currently available for
a 6 month++ contract opportunity? We have a Client located in Downtown
Chicago, IL seeking an experienced MS SharePoint Specialist.

You will perform analysis, design and development of the firm's newly
implemented MS SharePoint Portal. You will be doing front and back end
development using Windows SharePoint Services version1 and version2.
You will also perform on-going technical research to identify solutions
for system requirements that arise through the use of the SharePoint
systems firm wide.

They are looking to start this position as soon as they possible/as soon
as they find the right fit.

I noticed your background on the web and thought we should talk. If this
basic description sounds interesting (obviously here is much more to the
project) and you are available please reply with your most recent resume as
a Word document.

If not feel free to forward my contact information to anyone you see fit.

I'm not even sure what Microsoft SharePoint Portal is, but my wife is from Chicago and it might be fun to go for awhile -- until they find out I'm totally incompetent.

10/22/04 10/22/04

Warmer Workers = Better Workers

Via FastCompany Now comes a link to this study that shows that warmer workers are better workers. According to the article:

When the office temperature in a month-long study increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing output jumped 150 percent. Hedge's study was exploring the link between changes in the physical environment and work performance.

"The results of our study also suggest raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about $2 per worker, per hour," says Hedge, who presented his findings this summer at the 2004 Eastern Ergonomics Conference and Exposition in New York City.

Now excuse me while I crank up the thermostat.

10/20/04 10/20/04

Think Tank Tuesday

Several months ago, I first posted about Think Tank Tuesday, but have been pretty silent since. Yesterday, we had our second telephone and web conference (compliments of Zane at Conference Calls Unlimited), and I am far more excited about the concept (and the group) now than when I first started putting the idea together. We've even started our own private blog to facilitate conversations and share ideas in-between our bi-weekly telephone calls.

Our "TTT" group:

Mark Merenda

Stephen Nipper

Karen Post

Lori Richardson

Evelyn Rodriguez

Zane Safrit

Todd Sattersten

Don "The Idea Guy" Snyder

Doug Sorocco

Once we have our third "meeting," I'll post more about how we are using TTT to help us incubate new ideas and grow our businesses. If anyone would like some help starting a similar group, let me know.

10/11/04 10/11/04

Take a Clarity Retreat

Evelyn Rodriguez has a great post titled Accelerating Elusive Aha! Moments in which she talks about taking a "clarity retreat" to help her solve problems. Evelyn is kind enough to share the creative process she uses on her retreats. Her tips:

1. Stay Open. Ask the questions, but let go of the answers. You might think you have a solution in mind, but don't cling to it. You'll be surprised at how much more brilliant your breakthrough will be if you just let go of your fixation that you won't come up with anything better than your so-so, blah(yawn) solution that's your back-up plan. Kill the back-up plan.

2. No-Hassle Beauty. Go somewhere simple that doesn't require a lot of pre-planning. No hassle = low-stress. This is not the time to go on a worldwind tour of Europe. Guy Kawasaki gave away a great retreat location if you live in the Bay Area in his new book, The Art of the Start. (I'm not telling in a public forum, though you can email me.) Ideally stay close to home to avoid air travel; somewhere quiet, typically in nature; and somewhere you'd enjoy being. Ideas can range from day hiking from a base camp/lodge; kayaking along a gentle river or sheltered bay; cross-country skiing hut-to-hut; soaking the gentle sunbeams on the beach as you watch the tide come in; or chilling out on the veranda sipping wine in Napa Valley. Twice I've gone on backpacking trips - but this may require too much preparation if you don't regularly backpack.

3. Treat yourself. Re-treat yourself over and over. Make sure you are eating well (if you're packing and making your own food, make it as simple to prepare as possible so it doesn't feel like an ordeal...unless you adore cooking...) and sleeping well.

4. Bring a journal. Only journal if you don't have to force the words on paper - only when and if you're a conduit to your heart without filtering it through your head. Carry the journal wherever possible. You never know when you might want to sketch or write a poem or something seems important to jot down - leave the option open. Don't worry if you never even crack it open. That may just be what's needed especially if you do journal alot now. On one multi-day backpack trip to Grand Canyon, I didn't write a single word. I thought I had "wasted" the retreat time. Nope, it turned out I needed a break from journaling as well. I was overwhelmed with ideas when I returned back home including the entire outline for a book.

5. Avoid email, cellphone and even blogging. Really retreat. Don't listen to news, radio, or pick up the paper. If you are weak (as I am), you may need to go somewhere where it is impossible to stay in touch - you'd be surprised, even in Bay Area you can drive two miles outside of I-280 and be out of cellphone range and in the beauty of nature.

6. Go alone. With practice you can go with others that are also seeking time to be more contemplative, but the tendency is to be drawn to go sight-see, chat, and otherwise be distracted.

7. Focus on Being Present. I used to be pretty restless and extremely prone to boredom. If you don't want to "do nothing" that's fine. Fully engage with what you are doing. Anything that captures your attention fully - whether that's because you enjoy it intensely or to let your mind wander would be deadly (whitewater-kayaking comes to mind for me). Limit your time reading - and when you do, make it inspirational instead of intellectual. The entire idea is to rest your mind. So whatever you are doing, really do it and nothing else. Be nowhere else that moment. See the glint of the water splashing on the stone, feel the caress of the wind playing through the aspen trees, note the firmness and the give as the autumn leaves crunch under your footfall, gaze at the crystal moon lying on your back against the meadow grass, admire the depth of the sheer vertical vermillion canyon walls echoing your call.

Evelyn's blog Crossroads Dispatches continually has great posts like this one. I'm going to schedule a clarity retreat for three days next week. I'll let you know how it goes.

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