Some time back my son and I participated in a service project to help a young family clean out a back yard.  At one time the yard was a wonderful oasis with a swimming pool, lush garden, and beautiful walkways.  The once beautiful oasis was neglected over time and became an overgrown jungle of northwest foliage with its prime resident being thorny blackberry bushes.  The blackberry bushes were six feet tall and covered most of the yard.  What a prickly mess!

Years back a required skill for secretaries (politically correct = administrative assistants) was shorthand.  There are a number of shorthand systems including Gregg Shorthand, Pitman Shorthand, and Handywrite Shorthand.  With the advent of technology, texting, and 140-character tweets the Mad Men-era shorthand has been replaced by a world of abbreviations and phonetic acronyms which describe the most popular thoughts, feelings, and reactions that we use in our daily speech.  Most acronyms are easily decipherable, some  take a bit of noodling to understand, while still others require a quick web search to translate. 

My wife, son and I went to New York City some time back to celebrate my son's graduation from high school.  We stayed in a great hotel that my wife scored right in Times Square.  While in NYC we took the opportunity to take in a couple of Broadway shows.  One that we were all very excited about seeing was Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark.  The music, acting, and effects were all terrific and were executed flawlessly....with one exception.

As a small business owner I’ve had many many discussions with colleagues about my products and services.  Throughout these discussions I have gleaned some outstanding pieces of advice  about things I should be focusing on and ideas that I should be pursuing.  I also have been on the receiving end of some pretty random ideas which may have had some merit in the eyes of the beholder but just didn't seem to fit well with the direction that I want to take the business.  One colleague of mine got pretty peeved with me because I wasn't executing upon his advice.  The truth is, his advice just didn't align with the other advice I was getting and didn't fit well with the direction that I want to go.  I stuck with my spider-senses and didn't execute upon his advice.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in working with my clients.  There is an increased focus on companies assembling project teams comprised of cross-organizational team members to solve problems. This is increasingly being done in favor of single organizations trying to produce results on their own.  More and more project teams are taking on "virtual" characteristics where teams are temporarily assembled and could be located anywhere in the country or the world.