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So time can slip away and a man can find a lot of things that need to be done. Seems that I have not been making the time for this blog.

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Lifelong Learning

So, it seems that many of the younger people that I have been meeting lately seem to think college taught them everything. It is interesting to watch as they realize that college only gave them a base of knowledge. It is also interesting to watch as they find out that companies are not as willing to let them experiment with actual production systems. It reminded me that I am a bit of an odd child and that I am one of those people that enjoys learning in every environment that is available. Many people seem to think that learning can only happen in the confining walls of a school or training classroom. In the old days when I was a kid the adults called it the school of hard knocks, learning by making mistakes and being forced to fix them yourself.

The point is that we are capable of learning at any point in our lives. We only need to keep an open mind and realize that education is not just about what some paper says we know, but about what we have experienced and how we can apply that to the task we have in front of us today. Maybe the most important thing you can learn in life is how to deal with failure. That may mean something as simple as changing a small part of a large project because you know it will not work (i.e. it will fail if not changed), asking for help from your boss or team because you have or will fail in meeting your project goals (getting ahead of or admitting failure), or fixing the project that just fell apart in front of you (it failed) because it is your responsibility (this may mean getting help or getting dirty, but it does mean getting the job done). In almost every job I can remember doing in my short life, I have really been paid for fixing something that broke or failed to meet expectations. Most jobs are not about what you can do, they are about what you can do when everything is going wrong. And if you think this is not about Mr. Mike's read that last line again.

What is the point?

The point is to start getting people to read this blog. My idea is to add Twitter and my website to the system and see what happens. One of my issues is that I have never been interested in people knowing who I am, it is more important that they know what I can get done. My goals are to produce results. Too many people in the world today want to produce things that get attention, but results seem to be secondary.

How you build a solution does not seem to count with a lot of people, but in the end it is where you provide true value to the customer. Quality is not in the presentation, it is in the delivery. I find it sad that so many small businesses are overlooked because they do not have the best looking marketing collateral. It is something that we want to address with Mr. Mike's, but it is not something that we want to focus on to the detriment of our real customer value. The funny part is that you can not provide any value to the customer if you fail to market and sell your products and services to begin with.

So, the point is that marketing does not provide direct customer value, but value can not be delivered if your marketing fails to bring customers to your business. We must find ways to create a compelling image for Mr. Mike's that develops enough interest from prospective customers to support our sales goals. I have more on this, but I must head off for a bit of a meeting.......

More on Mr. Mikes

I want to warn you, this is not going to be a consistent plan at this point. This is more a place for me to think out loud and to point a few people to who are helping me build some opportunities. It is a place that I can put some of the public ideas that we have and want to share with other people. Today I want to talk about an idea that a few people have asked us about and why they have asked us about this particular idea. First the why.

Several years ago one of the Mikes was asked to give a talk about weapons, now this was right after 9-11 and people were interested in how they could defend themselves. When you see the word weapon you might think about guns, knives, and clubs, but you would be looking at a very narrow band of what we might call weapons. As it turns out I was the one that ended up giving the presentation, but it was only due to a scheduling conflict with another Mike. The short story is that this began a very long conversation in our group of friends that continues today. It expanded to a discussion of what does one do if the civil authority breaks down in a region or area. It was interesting to find out that several of the Mikes not only had "go to hell" plans, but had "bug out bags" in one form or another. Now the what.

I am not sure if this started as one of our side conversations, or as a basic extension of our individual planning, or as a suggestion from one of our friends that had never even considered the need for a plan to leave and regroup if some major incident caused a loss of civil authority. This could be as far down the road as open warfare or as simple as a natural disaster that temporarily created unlivable conditions (yes, I am talking about something along the lines of New Orleans in Aug and Sept of 2005, notice that I did not blame the storm or the government as neither can do more than their nature allows). How many people would not have been better off by grabbing essential clothing, equipment, and documents and heading to a safe location until the danger passed? What about small groups or communities setting up locations for mutual protection and survival if an event happens? What would you do and where would you go if you only had a few minutes to gather things and head for a safe location? This is where it got interesting to the mikes, this is the point that somebody listening to us talk asked if we had room for another person and how much would that cost. Interesting question, can this be done as a business and how would one structure something like this for it to actually have a chance to work? This got us back on New Orleans, how would you evacuate a city like that today? Has anyone thought about how it should work and how to fix all those issues? Well we have, but those are ideas that we will only share with a contract in place. Free form writing can be fun....more later 21st