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.

I’m looking for ideas about different sources – online, books, and software – for helping a teenager learn how to program. I’m looking for both introductory / early programming stuff as well as general computer science stuff. The more interactive, the better. If you have any ideas, please post your comments.

EndurancePlanet put up an interview with me about running marathons. If you are a runner, or just want to hear me talk about something different than entrepreneurship and venture capital, enjoy the roughly one mile (10:46) of interview.

Another GooglePark episode is up and it’s hilarious (as usual.) And – as a special bonus – I discovered EllisonPark which I have no idea how I missed before.