These are 7 questions that have been keeping me up at night since I read them this weekend on Chris Brogan’s blog:

What are the basic, bare-bones components of our business? – Use small words. Describe it as briefly as you can. No matter if you THINK you know the business, try it again.

How do we share? – Inside the business, outside the business, it’s important to figure this out. Think broadly about “share.” With social tools, there are lots of implications, but inside the company, it’s crazy and potentially bit.

How do we collaborate? – Similar but different to sharing, the question is: now that we have these amazing tools, how do we best apply them to collaborative efforts: business-to-customer, customer-to-customer, business-to-business, etc. The last of these, business-to-business, is harder than you think. Do you dare open your company up for external collaboration? Software companies do it all the time. Would it work for you?

How do we wire new networks? – Let’s accept that social software like Facebook and Twitter are part of what’s next. How do we tap these in concerted ways? How do we build interactivity for our own business purposes into these tools? And here’s one: what would happen if one of them went away? Do you have a plan b?

How do we make new distribution points? – I have a new favorite thing to say at conferences with regards to distribution: Walmart and the Mafia are both masters of it. In both cases, they learned how to bypass prior roadblocks, they learned how to shift materials faster into buyers’ hands. They know how to distinguish between buyers and non-buyers. Do you? And are you expanding your distribution? Are you jumping gates?

How do we develop relationships that yield? – It’s great to have 100,000 friends on Twitter. How many take action? Of the 36,000 folks who subscribe to my blog, I usually get between 50-100 comments per post. That’s less than 1/3 of 1%. If comments were my business, I’d say that stinks. Relationships that yield are how we separate “friends” or “community members” from “customers” in our various business buckets. They overlap, but for the sake of this question, think strongly about “yield” and what it means to you.

Where is that yield and how do we extract value? – You’ll note that I don’t ask you for much in the way of money. I like to ask big companies for it. You? I like to give things away for free, because it’s also a strong way to advertise what I know, because I want you to succeed, etc. But somewhere along the line, baby needs to eat. Where do you extract value from your efforts? (This one is particularly tricky and important.)

Jesse Rice gives us valuable insights regarding our innate need for connection and how it is most clearly revealed in the experience of dis-connection.  Dropped cell phone calls, the loss of a job or career opportunity, a romantic breakup, the death of a loved one-each kind of disconnection alerts us to the fact that we were meant to connect.  He uses BBC’s Television series Horizon as an excellent choice to explain further how six people subjected themselves to forty-eight hours of sensory deprivation.

I was hooked to the remainder of the book once I read the second chapter Revolution which gives us a history behind Facebook and it’s founder Mark Zuckerberg.  One quote that stood out was from Clive Thompson who calls Facebook “the most significant intergenerational shift since rock’n roll.”

What’s fascinating is that Rice does a great job explaining the spiritual, psychological, physical ramifications of this shift and how it is changing how we live, worship, and relate to the world around us.

We’ve all experienced the emotional buzz that Rice talks about that keeps us thirsty for more.  We get chills up our spine when we reconnect with our friends and family from the past.

He leaves us at the end of the book with this question:

“How can we take our co-creative tools modeled by Jesus-intentionality, humility, and authenticity-and use them to make something good like Facebook even better?”

5 points to put this into action:

1-Practice regular check-ins with ourselves

2-Make the intention to not go online immediately before bed and immediately after waking up

3-Practice mindful Facebooking

4-Practice authentic Facebooking

5-Adopt one or two Facebook friends for one month

-later i sent a text to Los with this question-

ME: So,if partnering with rockstars is key...how do u define rockstar?

LOS: Someone who works their butt off AND has the talent to match.
Too many ppl have just one or the other.

LOS: Who is this?

-used by permission-

[photo of Daley Hake by alyssa]

I work alone in my basement.  I have no employees, little overhead, 1 editing bay, 2 laptops, my Blackberry Storm and a Canon Vixia HV30.

In the beginning, I worked alone on projects.  My customers were aware of that and we worked out creative strategies to co-op and share resources and information.

Recently, however, I have discovered new resources and partners by leveraging my online relationships that were developed through social networking.   This came up in a conversation with my friend @allanwhite when I was considering going back to school to develop some new skills . I have been able to do more faster, better and stronger than before by leveraging my relationships and finding people with skills in areas that I do not have.  I’ve always wanted to work on a team with fun, creative people.  What if you could work with cool people who have the same vision and dreams that you do?

What are you doing to build a team if you work solo?

[photo via AzureOblivion]