Sunday, April 18, 2004

I was thinking tonight on my way home about how the best business model, from my perspective, and potentially realistic in this day and age, would be to have a company founded on the equity of ideas. Each initial member starts out with an equal share. As long as that individual keeps up with contributing to the company with ideas or execution or both, he or she keeps her shares. If that individual, in the eyes of other shareholders, does not contribute to the growth of the company, he or she either gets no additional shares, or is possibly, in the most dire, freeloader situations, gets stripped of those shares by a two-thirds vote of other shareholders, with compensation for those shares based on the market value at the last point at which that person was making a postive contribution, as evinced either by increased number of shares, or by the fact that the person got a vote of no confidence a certain number of votes in a row, over a period of time. That partially changes the equation to a direct measure of what value the person is bringing into the company, rather than an articificial monetary measure, albeit potentially with real dollars associated with it. 11:54:27 PM

I hope I never lose the wonder at how plants grow. I felt the same awed giddy when the beans we planted in grade school sprouted looking out over my growing green lawn. Awesome. Especially wondering the night before if I would see any growth at all. And then this morning, literally overnight, patches of delicate blades, peeping up, like the first beard. I'm finding that accomplishing, completing, start to finish, one single task each day is adding sanity to my life, even if it's just reading the paper front to back. But today, watering the lawn, cleaning up the forsythia root stumps, putting out the old fence for bulk pick up, shoveling all the tear out debris the rehab down the street dumped  in the alley, and mowing  mine and Heather and Tim's and Tom's lawns,  made me realize that one of the even more sanity inspiring ideas is to not think of completion in terms of the big picture with everything, but smaller bites. It's not about completely landscaping the yard, front and back. It's about grading the soil. Planting grass. All of these small, manageable pieces that give gold stars along the learning and doing path. Snack eyed me guiltily when I got home tonight, early, from work. As if I'd disturbed some secret Saturday night ritual. Maybe he's teaching himself piano. Or checking out the Japanese bond market. Who knows. I made the worst Euchre faux pas ever tonight - I forgot who my partner was, and selected trump based thinking the dealer on my right was my partner. They would have won the hand anyway, but Matt and I wouldn't have been Euchred. I didn't realize until after I got there that I was probably a little too altered to be hanging out in public in the first place, at least among people I don't know all that well, and especially doing any activity that involved brain power. I got it back on later, but not until some huge blunders. I hope I don't get tetanus from my rusty nail puncture wounds. Never move old boards with nasty nails sticking out of them in shorts and flip flops. 1:09:17 AM