This is part 2 of 2 blog post reviewing my initial experience with the collaborative workspace, Gangplank.

Pack your lunch and stay a while.

Based on my first visit to Gangplank, I decided to commit to spend more time there. So I returned the next Wednesday. This time I got there much earlier than during my first visit and found out I was in time for “Brownbag“. Not having a full understanding of what was going on, I was intrigued as to what it was. This day was a open panel discussion held between the “anchors.” After listening to the discussion and researching what a “brownbag” actually is, I found that it’s where Gangplank invites leaders in the local community to share the success they’ve enjoyed, and challenges they’ve faced in their careers. In this particular case, Gangplank refers to anchors as

“companies that base their operations out of Gangplank, with permanent desk space for multiple employees. Each anchor is involved in Gangplank planning meetings, as well as contributes to the community through donations, services, etc.”

Trust is built through engagement.

During and after the panel discussion, I spent a few minutes getting familiar with each of the members and their organizations. Quite a nice blend of marketing, strategy, designers, developers, and small business mentors. I got a good sense as to why these guys were up there talking – about what they love, their drive and passion clearly showed.

After the discussion, I had the opportunity to speak with Tim from Brand Adoption. We had a great conversation about social media growth, the important of trust within communities, and product value. Heck, I even recall some laughs about how we thought we know what we wanted to do before college. (Gosh…if I only knew then what I know now!)

Game on!

After Tim and I finished up our conversation, I returned to my little work area and anxiously awaited for Hacknight Street Hockey game starting at 7pm. After some help from Chuck Reynolds of Rynoweb and Andrew Ryno with some PHP related issues, I changed changed into some workout clothes and headed across the street to the parking garage to play some street hockey.

It was a great time and was an excellent reminder to me on how I need to adjust to the dry air. Moving from southwest Florida (where the average humidity is 98 bajillion percent) to the Phoenix area (where, well… let’s just say it’s very dry) – I needed to stay hydrated. I think some of the guys thought I was going to pass out and die mid-game. Great group of guys. Had the opportunity to meet Chris Conrey, who is responsible for organizing the game. So… thank you, Chris. After about an hour or so of having my butt handed to me, we wrapped the game up and headed back Gangplank HQ.

Got ink?

After the friendly game of street hockey, there was a tattoo session scheduled at 9pm. Mike Benner stepped up to the plate and had the guys from Tabu Tattoo and inked up his back with Gangplank’s tagline, “Be Dangerous.” The session was great and I’m looking forward to seeing the finished/healed work.

While all this was going on, I was asked if I minded that my “personal geek space” was to be invaded. This was when I had the pleasure meeting April Holle of Made Better Studio. After a candid introduction, we sat back and watched the tattoo session and discussed what brought us to Gangplank. By then, it was getting late and time for me to get home. I had a 45 minute drive, so I wrapped things up and took off.

General Consensus:

Gangplank is great collaborative workspace and offers one roof for technologists – from designers to developers, market strategy consultants, students and tutors, entrepreneurs and mentors, and musicians. It’s directly described as:

“a group of connected individuals and small businesses creating an economy of innovation and creativity in the Valley. We envision a new economic engine comprised of collaboration and community, where industries come together to transform our culture.”

The place has a great vibe and company of people who know that when great minds with great ideas get together at once place, great things happen. I’m looking forward to moving in the right direction with the “pirates” at Gangplank.

If you want to read Part 1 of 2 of this blog post, click here.

Walking the Plank (Part 2 of 2) is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

The other night a friend and I were catching up. We usually go back and forth about our favorite sport teams (here is where I lose a few readers… Go Tigers!, Go Wings!, Go Blue!), exchange a few of the latest laughable videos that are floating around on the web, and then wrap up with some profession related topics, questions, comments, and/or gibberish. These usually start fairly late at night and then go onto late/early hours into the morning. I get blamed for sidetracking my friend, who apparently only works late at night.

Catching up and sharing.

So as we are going through our motions, Dave (friend) realizes that I have recently moved from the southwest Florida region to the metro Phoenix, Arizona area. The topic of work, school, and significant other get mentioned, we chat a bit about all three and then he proceeds to give me a few names of some contacts in which he knows that are of IT, SEO, and WordPress relation. One of the contacts and links he sent me pointed me in the direction of a collaborative community called “Gang Plank.” I took a quick peak and bookmarked the webpage to come back to after our chat. Upon further review, I happened to notice that the areas of focus seem to pertain to many of my passions: collaborative exchange, conceptual innovation, music, and many other areas in which harness the creative mindset. So I slated some time for their Hacknight which is every Wednesday night from 6pm to 9pm.

Let’s go check out Gang Plank!

I walked in and noticed many different things going on. Off to the right were a slew of Macs…most vacant, as for most of the attention was directed towards the Street Fighter II game in the back of the room.

There must have been 25-30 people checking out what was going on. “Hadouken!” filled my ears and took me back to a old friend’s basement, where as kids we would play the game for hours and hours.

Okay, at this point I have no idea what to do but can sense that I’m at the right place. I find myself drawn towards the bookcase at the front of the room. I notice a lot of great areas sectioned off within the bookcases, some even I know nothing about. I’m going to admit that I am ignorant when it comes to programming languages. PHP? Philadelphia Highway Patrol? C plus sharp flat, what? HTML? Hot Topic’s Mother Load, eh? – Okay, before I make myself look like even a bigger idiot when it comes to this stuff, let me move along and get back on topic.

Fly on the wall.

I sat down and ‘introverted’ myself in the corner, giving myself time to soak in everything that was going on. There were a few guys sitting on a couch talking about what they do for a living. One mentioned he was an accountant and the other expressed he was an urban developer. Then an independent architect walks in, and sits down with the two gentlemen sitting on the couch and they began skimming the surface of what interests them, proceeding to exchange business cards. It was nice to see such a unique climate of professional networking.

Game on!

Earlier in the day, I received a tweet regarding a street hockey game. I brought some workout clothes but unfortunately, I did not play. Next time… it’s on! Tighten up the laces and get ready to unleash the Hockeytown that runs in my blood!

Kick in the ‘keister’.

Earlier in the day, Dave expresses the importance to “kick Chuck in the keister” for him. This is not something I do when I first meet somebody but have been known to do during my second encounter…maybe.

It was getting close to 8:30pm and my laptop battery was ready to die. Chuck had just returned from stepping out for a few – so I packed up my laptop bag and walked over to introduce myself. I extended my hand and introduced myself. We caught up about what we do and he then proceeded to answer my question, “So, what is it that we do here… at Gangplank?”

Based on what I’ve written so far and by what you may have already researched, what do you thing Gangplank is?

Please keep your eye open for part 2 of 2…a continuation of this post, “Walking the Plank.”

Walking the Plank (Part 1 of 2) is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

Six weeks ago, I received an invitation to be a featured blogger at the 2010 World Business Forum, which is being held October 5th and 6th at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Come to find out, this is an invitation-only opportunity offered to a select group of top business bloggers, and establishes a membership amongst the WBF10 Bloggers Hub.

As I read over the invite, I was uncertain if it was actually true. I expressed gratitude for kindly extending the invitation to attend the forum and asked why I was chosen to attend, as for I felt that I had yet to contribute anything of significance to the leadership community. Micheal Singer replied with: “I found your blog on someone else’s blogroll, and I took a brief look and liked what I saw. We’re looking for interesting viewpoints. And while many of our bloggers have institutional ties and recognition, etc., we also want some new voices. This is a great opportunity to stretch your voice and reach some new people if you want the opportunity. It’s that simple.”

Past speakers in the World Business Forum include political figures such as Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, Rudy Giuliani, Tony Blair and Colin Powell, CEOs such as Jack Welch, Richard Branson, Herb Kelleher and John Chambers, financial experts Alan Greenspan and Jeremy Siegel as well as management experts Tom Peters, Peter Drucker and Jim Collins among others. This year’s World Business Forum boasts a dynamic agenda and a dizzying array of speakers, including former U.S. Vice-President/Nobel Prize Recipient Al Gore; Avatar director James Cameron; Blue Ocean Strategy co-author Renée Mauborgne and more than a dozen other exciting thought leaders spanning the spectrum of world business.

After inquiring with the management company responsible for putting together the forum, I found that as a member of the WBF10 Bloggers Hub, I will be spending two days with a bird’s eye view of these thought leaders as they explore the latest trends and challenges in global business today. The Hub will also offer me an unparalleled opportunity to share their insights with my audience via blog, twitter, etc… something very important to me, as for it’s readers just like you that keep me at this.

To see a list of the bloggers who participated last year and to read a sample of their posts, visit the World Business Forum’s Blogger Hub; you can find complete details about WBF10, including all the conference speakers and topics here.

Thank you again to each and every one of you for your support. I am humbly honored to be invited to such an event and look forward to blogging my little fingers off for you!

World Business Forum 2010 is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

Thomas Edison had only a few months of formal education. After being told by his headmaster that he was unmanageable, his mother, a teacher, home-schooled him. Passionately curious, Edison sought answers for why things happened. He tried hatching eggs by sitting on them. He accidentally burned down his father’s barn attempting an experiment, and he gave a friend some gas-producing potion to drink to see if the gas would make him fly. He drove adults crazy with the constant questions of why, how, and if. His bedroom was a minefield that no person would dare enter without fear of harm. In truth, his headmaster was right: Edison was unmanageable. But he was also brilliant.

Edison viewed the world as a place of strange and wonderful things, and he wanted to know about everything. He became the most prolific inventor of our time by pushing questions into discovery. It was best known to him as the analogy: If you want to make a sculpture, take a block of stone and carve away what doesn’t need to be there…all while he learned that he was an inventor, Edison took the opposite direction…by taking pieces and putting them together to create something new and useful. Hence, one of his infamous quotes: “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

Inventing is the purest form of entrepreneurship. Yet many good ideas for inventions are never completed because people are intimidated by the process: not only must your idea come fruition, you also need to patent it, make it in large numbers, and sell it. Sometimes it’s just simpler to cash out: sell your design to someone else to produce and sell your vision.

If you want to hold onto all of the profits, you will have to go through the complicated patent process yourself. You would be wise to hire a patent attorney. Those who preserve though the patenting process can realize substantial rewards. Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway personal transport, holds over 440 U.S. and foreign patents. He was already the inventor of the infusion pump for insulin and chemotherapy before the invention of the Segway, and Kamen is now referred to as an “inventrepreneur.”

We need to be reminded that so much to be learned in life isn’t learned in school. Each day presents a chance to figure out a way to view your life. Look for the opportunity to learn new things about yourself and you business that no graduate school course could possibly teach.

Educating the Inventrepreneur is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

Entrepreneurs throughout the world are looking for the missing link in an industry, a rift so to speak, as marketing guru Seth Godin describes it, an opening waiting to be filled. Successful new businesses often fill a need that no one else knew even existed.

Many times new rifts open as industries progress. Take the television, for example. The Digital Age forced analog televisions owners to purchase a converter in order to tune in to the digital television world. Hands-free headset manufacturers made a fortune once lawmakers made it illegal to drive and talk on their cell phones at the same time.

Where do you think the next rift will be? Seth Godin has come to the conclusion that “Most people who build important businesses build them on a rift, usually one that they find by accident, and usually only once.” Today’s marketers are looking for the rifts where businesses can address the aging baby boomer.

Seth Godin has filled a rift, partly as the author of several bestselling marketing books. He has fully embraced the computer age, writing a popular marketing blog and founding a “recommendation” website. Although someone else will come along and replace Godin’s ideas as fast as you can hit Ctrl/Alt/Delete, his early entry into the Web community brought marketing into a contemporary world.

Seth Godin became remarkable by taking a clear look at the age of technology and assessing exactly what was going on. Then he was able to make sweeping statements about how businesses had to think about this new world, not only to succeed but to stand out. Godin was a small business owner who has churned out books that have made him a big success. Try adding these concepts into your entrepreneurial mix:

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit– Godin promotes the theory that there is a dip in the road that is either the entrance to superstardom or the signal you are hitting a dead end.

Small Is the New Big– Godin discusses the backlash against bigness after several pivotal events, including the Enron debacle. He talks about how “small” can move faster than “big” and how that can mean the difference between success or not.

All Marketers Are Liars– Godin gives countless examples of marketing people “stretching the truth.” But he makes one thing clear: “Your story won’t spread (which is the whole principal of marketing) if the facts don’t back it up.”

Survival Is Not Enough– Successful entrepreneurs embrace change… and change is only happening faster with the Information Age.

I’m really interested in your feedback and comments. If you have anything you’d like to add or express, please comment below.

The Entrepreneurial Rift is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

The other day I had a sudden realization about the importance of emotion and logic.  When I was managing a small computer support service provider, I would work closely with specialized technicians, programmers, integrators, accounting personnel, legal professionals, medical directors, and the obvious internal staffing of my company. Over the handful of years, I’d found it to be challenging to find people that had “the balance” of emotional and logical skill set in which I thought to be a “common sense standard”.  With the above established, I decided to put together the following blurb of research that I’ve recently developed:

A generalized overview with the expansion of the Internet and the resulting globalization of business activity, the capacity of the influence of information technology (now referenced as IT) has increased significantly. Many innovative business practices are being enabled specifically by IT. The capacity for integration of information in alpha/numeric, text, voice, and video form will give rise to an even greater abundance and impact of IT in the future. Also, the information systems (now referenced as IS) development profession has been maturing and IS has been recognized as a socio-technical endeavor for some time. For system developers, the need to communicate effectively with users and team members has been increased significantly.

A survey taken in 1993 of 192 human resource personnel responsible for hiring new IS graduates in the Denver, Colorado area discovered that, in addition to knowledge in applied computing and business, it was very important that a new IS hire be educated in: 1) the ability to learn, 2) the ability to work in teams, 3) oral and written communication, 4) problem solving and reasoning, and 5) a point of reference to health and wellness. In short, adaptability, communication, and stress management are seen as key skills for the IS professional. Yet, such skills are not developed through logic alone, but involve the “soft areas” of feelings, instinct, and senses.

A little over 25 years ago, there were two researchers, Couger and Zawacki, who  reported that, while IS professionals (systems analysts and programmers) had the lowest needs for social interaction on the job, they reported much higher “growth needs” than the other professionals surveyed. While at the time, growth needs were largely understood as greater development of professional proficiencies, there now appears to be some evidence that the IS development profession may be ready for a more holistic approach to growth.

For example, a management scientist, in his book on IS management, has called for extending Maslow’s hierarchy of needs beyond self-actualization to “self-donation” and has provided a concrete example of such a stage in the career of a systems analyst. An article in Computerworld has called for “emotional literacy among IS professionals” in the context of personality awareness. There was a convention of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), where a keynote speaker proposed that “love” and not confrontation be the model for organizational communication, and received a standing ovation. A job advertisement for IT professionals within an insurance company in a prominent U.S. software center points out that this employer is interested in contributing to the employee’s professional and personal life, and advises candidates to “listen to their inner voice.” A prominent U.S. textbook author has referred, in the dedication of his text on IS for the Internetworked Enterprise to “experiencing the Light within.” In a recent Canadian survey on stress among IS professionals, the most frequently mentioned desired coping resource was “personal development seminars,” closely followed by “conflict resolution seminars.”

Also, the concept of “emotional intelligence” is being increasingly emphasized in management literature. It is being recognized that, while the traditional IQ (intelligence quotient) can help a person to get a job, it is the EQ (emotional quotient) that will allow the person to keep the job and to progress satisfactorily in his/her career.

Thus, the stage appears to be set for a preliminary attempt to address specific psychological factors as applied to the work of various IT professionals such as system and data analysts, programmers, project managers, help desk personnel, and also software engineers, telecommunications designers, and others. In this context, the term IT is considered to include a broader range of positions, whereas IS is more restricted to the activities of planning, analysis, design, development, and deployment of computerized business application systems.

Emotional Intelligence in Technology is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

Here is an interesting article about some former Google employees leaving to build social networking sites.   This was found on the Mashable and it offers an insight into the importance of building your brand or products community.  This continues to be the secret success for online companies as well as traditional companies.  As Seth Godin describes in his book Tribes, once you have a loyal “Tribe” following you and your product there is nothing you can’t achieve. But how do you do this?  In my opinion, it starts with being authentic. Second, have to build trust.  Finally, you have to provide a product or service that can go viral.  Are your customers proud to talk about your product and promote it to their friends and family?  If you can answer yes to all three you are well on your way to having a smashing success on your hands.

For an outstanding article summarizing some of greatest Lessons Learned from Seth Godin, just click on the hyperlink.

Are You Building Your Community? is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big

Twitter is a messaging service that shares a lot of characteristics with communication tools you already use. It has elements that are similar to email, IM, texting, blogging, RSS, social networks and so forth. But a few factors, particularly in combination, make Twitter unique:

Messages you send and receive on Twitter are no more than 140  characters, or about the length of a news headline. That means they’re really easy to write and read.

Messages on Twitter are public, like blog posts, and you don’t have to give people permission to see what you’ve written. That means you can readily meet new people on Twitter.

The messages are opt-in, and people choose to get a stream of others’ messages. (On
Twitter, this model is called “following.”) That means you have to be interesting, or
people will choose not to get your updates.

You can send and receive the messages via a variety of mechanisms, including mobile
phones, PCs, websites and desktop programs, and they’re distributed in real time. That
means that Twitter can fit with nearly anyone’s workflow.

When you add all that together, and you throw in a dose of the friendliness common on
Twitter today, you get a powerful and appealing communications platform that turns out to
be highly useful for a slew of personal and professional needs.

What is Twitter? is a post from: Geoff Snyder's Leadership and Team Collaboration Blog - Freedom to Think and Dream Big