In the spirit of the new year and thinking about resolutions or goals for 2010, this week’s theme here at delputnam.com has been goals, how I set them and how I intend to keep them. I said that I’m not making any resolutions this year, but I’m going to try something a little different. So, here’s the scoop: instead of resolutions, I’m going to work on themes.

In the Being Fabulous post, I noted that one of the tough things about setting goals for things you don’t have much experience with is that there is often a lot of research involved and its tough to know how to properly state a goal when you don’t have enough information up front.

So, the idea of setting themes for the year is intended to help me focus on the research aspect of goal setting. My hope is that as I learn more about these themes, I’ll be able to incorporate them into my life and create meaningful goals. Will this work? I don’t know, but it should be interesting.

Anyhow, the themes I’ve selected for this year are: communities, ecosystems, and transparency. I’m sure that everyone reading this (both of you) have different understandings of what those words mean. So here’s a little bit of information on why I selected these themes and what they mean to me.

Communities

The reason I selected this as a theme is that I’ve been thinking a lot about how what people used to call “networks” are really more like communities. I know I’m probably about five years late to the party with this thought, but, hey, at least showed up.

Communities are important to all of us in so many different ways. We rely on them for some of our most basic needs of support, assistance, guidance and companionship. A good community helps point us in the right direction and when you add your own thoughts and actions to your community, you have the privilege of helping others and spreading your own message too.

This isn’t really a new concept at all, but its one that a lot of people haven’t really applied to their business lives very well yet and I intend to learn everything I can about how to form, participate in and work with communities for business this year.

I’m going to start by reading Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community (which I wanted to read last year, but never got around to). I’m also going to continue to follow and learn from the master community builder himself, Chris Brogan. I also plan to try to connect with as many new people as I can and help build communities that I touch. How will I do all of that? I don’t know exactly yet, but ask me in a couple of months. Maybe I’ll have some better answers then.

Ecosystems

In order for communities, partnerships, business, or anything else to succeed, the right support systems have to be in place around them. That’s what I mean by ecosystems.

So many times, a project I’m working on fails, not because it was a bad idea, or even because it was poorly executed, but because I didn’t put the right “life-support” systems in place around the project to prevent it from starving to death after it’s set in motion. To really ensure the long term success of projects I work on this year, I’m going to try to focus on creating self-sustaining ecosystems around everything I work on.

I don’t have any pre-planned, ready research for this theme, yet. I’m open to suggestions. Any ideas where I score some more good thinking about creating ecosystems?

Transparency

This is a tough one. It’s really all about communication and honesty. The tough part is to know how transparent to be. Being too transparent with the wrong groups is like walking around naked. It’s just too much information. On the other hand, not being transparent enough leaves you out of the conversation and you sort of fade away and become irrelevant.

Just like I don’t want to walk around naked all the time, I have to pick and choose how much I share with the different groups in my life. There are things I’ll talk to my spouse about that I won’t talk to my kids about, even though I want to be open and honest with both of them.

At work, the executive team shares things with each other that we don’t share with the rest of the company–for good reasons. But if we don’t share enough information, everyone will fill in the gaps with their own stories which are usually scary or upsetting.

With partners, analysts, and other influencers, I want to share all of the great things we are doing, what we’re planning and get them excited about our company. I don’t want to share the warts and problems, but sometimes sharing those can help people understand us better too.

By default, I tend to be fairly honest and reasonably private. But, as I go through the year, I’m going to try to do a better job of finding the right level of transparency with the different groups in my life.

So, what do you think? Is the idea of themes a good one? Do you have any themes you want to work on this year?

Let me know.

photo credit, Darwin Bell