I listen to a lot of audio books. I have had a subscription audible.com for over four years and have amassed a personal audio book library of over 150 books. For $21.95 per month I can download any two books in the audible.com collection - usually the retail value of each book is in the $30 - $50 range, so I figure it’s a pretty good deal.

I typically use my phone for the listening, which is nice because you always have it with you and it enables you to make really good use of car time. Currently I use an iPhone, prior to that I used my Treo, before that I used my Audiovox PDA running Windows Mobile (*cringe*, but I thought it was cool at the time). I have learned a ton doing this and would sooner lose my Tivo than my Audible subscription. I highly reccommend developing an audio book habit if you don’t have one already.

Of the 150 books in my library, I have gone out and purchased physical copies only three times. I am just finishing Kieth McFarland’s The Breakthrough Company and will be going to the book store to buy the physical book as soon as I’m done.

The majority of business books seem to focus on either the start-up stage of a company (think Starting on a Shoestring by Arnie Goldstein) or large company issues and sustainability (think Good to Great by Jim Collins). The Breakthrough Company fills a gap by focusing on the stages between start-up and massive. It profiles nine companies (much in the style of Good to Great) and through research and comparison has teased out principles and tactical priorities that have differentiated successful, growing mid-stage companies from those less successful.

If you don’t have the time to read it, go to Audible or iTunes and give it a listen - it’s well worth the price of admission.

Birth is a messy operation. The creative process is messy. A software application that is gonna scale better not be messy.

Giving birth to a new software application puts you in the very zen-like place of being both messy / not messy.

Does anyone hear the sound of one hand clapping?

ArcStone is in the final pangs of the Wonderfile birth process. We have our first paying Wonderfile customers - yeah! We have a number of consulting projects that leverage Wonderfile’s SOA (Service Oriented Architecture - in plain English: using web services to access Wonderfile functionality from any web site). And we find ourselves in the unique position of having developed a really useful tool - a fantastic, shiny Swiss army knife for tagging and file management.

We love it, we understand it - the tool works for us - but we’re finding that those who jump into Wonderfile just don’t get it.

I have come to realize, that most of our clients aren’t ready for Wonderfile as a general tool. They just don’t have the time or inclination to fully grok it - there’s no way there gonna buy it.

I know that our customers (and people in general) will buy a solution to a specific problem. People will visit Google and look for solutions to ease their pain / scratch that itch.

What is more likely to happen? Xavier has to manage leases for his company - keeping track of all the docs, expirations, etc. He goes to Google - does he search on “file management keyword search tagging reminders” or “lease management systems”? My money is on “lease management systems” - he has an itch that needs scratching in specific terms, not general. The more specific we can be with Wonderfile driven apps and Wonderfile marketing - the more successful we’ll be.

That’s our charter and the next round of work for us - tailoring Wonderfile and marketing it to solve specific problems in specific markets.

The product development folks call this “development to commercialization” - I call it ArcStone’s biggest marketing challenge for 2008.

Wonderfile driven apps - coming soon to a web site near you.

OK - this is a little off topic, but I’ve been having a lot of very vivid dreams lately.

Last night I dreamt that I was praying with Mark Johnson (Mark works with me as part of the executive management team at ArcStone and is the managing partner in charge of our association CRMs AMO and CMO).

In the dream we were saying the prayer together in the morning before we started work.

When I got up, I wrote down the prayer. It has a ring of authenticity (being made of dream stuff and all), and I like it - so I thought I’d share it here….

I just started reading a new book: “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a reluctant Businessman” by Yvon Chouinard, The founder of Patagonia.

The book is great. The concentration of the books content is the philosophy that Yvon holds and used for the development of his company. I could talk about the book and the specifics but you should just read the book. What’s most interesting to me is the idea of the philosophy and how he has put it into action.

There are a million seminars and books out there that give you the top 8 rules and the 5 most effective techniques to achieve “X”. The sad thing is most people take the seminar or read the book and then use what they learned once or twice, if at all, and then move on to the next popular thing. (I’m all for education and continuous learning, but this seems like waste of resources.) They never take the time to think about develop the foundation that they need (the beliefs, values, and ideals) so they can espouse the ideas through actions. Yvon’s admitted overwhelming management technique is “management by absence”. What I interpret from this is that day in and day out while he was out actually using and testing the equipment Patagonia creates he spent plenty of time thinking about and his ideas and building the foundation he needed to live and apply his philosophy in action.

The next time you read a current business or management book or attend a seminar, I challenge you to ask yourself afterward, “What foundation do I need to build to be able to apply this in action day in and day out?” Spend some time thinking about it over a few weeks before you dive into something else. Pick the three most important things that struck you as you read the book and let that be a filter that you use to view your world through. I find that this helps me build a foundation for which to apply and integrate new things into my daily behavior and actions.

Additional information:
You can purchase the book from Amazon or you can read an excerpt of the book at Outside Magazine’s website

We’re getting soooo close to our Wonderfile beta launch….

An old salty dog programmer (also very successful money-wise) once told me. “A software application isn’t really done until it’s been rewritten from scratch at least five times.”

We’re on our fourth rewrite of Wonderfile. It doesn’t encapsulate our complete vision for the app, but we feel that it’s quite useful as it is, and definitely good enough to publically beta test.

What is Wonderfile? It is a completely new way to think about organizing electronic files. We’re done with the nested folders of the 80’s and have created a hierarchical tag-based framework for managing files. This is really different stuff - a paradigm shift. Comments from experienced IT pros we’ve shown early demos to…

* “Why hasn’t anyone else done this?”

* “I can use this in a ton of different ways.”

* “How can I invest?”

We’ll be posting the access code for our limited beta on this blog October 15th. We’ll let 250 testers in to the system - first come first serve. They’ll be given privileged account status (i.e. less expensive after the test is over) and will be able to influence future development of the system.

For a sneak preview, come see us demo Wonderfile to our peers at Minnedemo Oct. 11 (free beer for the first 200 attendees). Minnedemo is held at O’Gara’s in St. Paul - the demo’s start at 7:30 and we’re the fourth company on stage…

Visit - http://minnedemo.org to register.

About six weeks ago, ArcStone discontinued its practice of offshoring indefinitely. Since then, I’ve been doing a fair amount of research into the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing. It’s become clear that a rational examination of this problem cannot occur by examining outsourcing and offshoring without considering the larger economic context. Read the rest of this entry »