My goal of running a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50 pales in comparison to the world’s longest foot race. 3,100 miles around a city block in Queens, NY (that would be over 5,000 laps) in approximately 51 days.

Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures has a what I think should become a classic entrepreneur post on business models. He gives some context about the term (and why it’s often annoying, as in “what’s your business model’ – c’mon – can’t you think of a deeper question?) He then decomposes the way he thinks about it, ending with a superb chart (that Peter acknowledges it likely incomplete.) While you might not think about this the same way Peter does, it should stimulate you to “think about how to think about” your business model.

Pascal Levensohn – the founder of Levensohn Venture Partners – wrote a comment to my post title The Agenda (in the Board of Directors series) that I wanted to promote to a full post (since I expect only some of you read comments.) Pascal linked to a presentation he used to moderate a panel on Best Practices for Running a Board Meeting. Excellent stuff.

The Agenda. This little one page document sets the tone, pace, and content of your board meeting. It’s fundamental to the success of a board meeting, so you’d think it wouldn’t be as screwed up as often as it is. As Jim Lejeal and I continue our Board of Directors series , we thought we tackle this subject next. Once you’ve attended a number of board meetings, we expect you’ll reach the conclusion that a good agenda can make a big difference in the quality of a board meeting. The most common mistake is that there isn’t an agenda; the second most common mistake is that when there is an agenda, it’s not followed. We’ve found the latter to be the more pervasive – it’s easy to put together a boilerplate agenda and use the same one meeting after meeting, but the board meeting itself covers a different set of issues and travels down a path that would cause an observer of the meeting to think the agenda and the meeting existed in parallel universes.

Lucy Sanders – the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology – was a key participant in last week’s Microsoft Annual Faculty Summit. InformationWeek has a good summary of the meeting – and the issues – up on the web in an article titled “Funding Innovation Where It’s Incubated.” The basic message – as stated directly by Dan Mote (president of the University of Maryland) is that “”Students do not see opportunity in our field [IT and computer science]. And it’s not just kids in poor districts–even the rich kids don’t get jazzed about tech. That’s going to be a problem as computer companies hunt for the next generation of workers.”

My friends at Slice of Lime just put up a website for the new Blink Gallery on 1011 Pearl Street in Boulder. Clean, simple, and contemporary, just like the gallery. We sure do miss Colorado art when we are up in Alaska.

Amy said a really nice thing to me the other day. We were talking and she said “One of the things I really admire about you is that your work is play to you.” I’ve always loved what I do. Yeah – I’ve had my share of really crappy days (and months, and even a crappy year or two – say around 2001) – but even when things are really rough, I treat the “work” part of it as indistinguishable from “play.” As I’ve figured out more things about how I relate to the elusive notion of work life balance I’ve determined that “always being on” is not a requirement for effective work (nor is it sustainable.) Once I’d finally decoupled the idea of work and play, it became easy to put them back together again since so much of what I work on is just a blast.

I talk and email with a lot of “random” people. I’ve blogged about my random meeting policy in the past – whenever I reflect on it I realize that it has served me well. I never have any specific expectations for these meetings and almost always enjoy the people that I meet. I have the same approach with email – I try to respond to everything I get (that’s not spam), even if it’s a short “sorry – I can’t be helpful” or “this isn’t interesting to me – good luck with things” type of message. I’m sure I occasionally miss someone / something, but I try. 

Paul Kedrosky – the author of the excellent, informative, and often entertaining Infectious Greed blog – sent me a link to a fantastic post by Art De Vany on Elite Athletic Training and Disease. It’s primarily a very thoughtful and insightful article by Mark Sisson on elite athletes, health, and overtraining. It’s great stuff for anyone that is an endurance athlete.