photo by jurvetson 

The American way is the creative and entrepreneurial spirit that remains strong even in the face of a terrible economy, bad news and a lot of reasons for people to be depressed.

I was fortunate enough to participate in the Kansas City Startup Weekend this past weekend and I came away with a new level of respect for innovation, creativity and  the ability for inspired, committed people to get stuff done.  A big thanks to Dan Melton at nptLabs for organizing the event!

If you don’t know, Startup Weekend is a celebration of the startup process – but the coolest part is that the attendees aren’t guests, but active participants that are on their own to make things happen.

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Do you have a desktop computer at your house and a laptop for work (or multiple work or home computers)?

Do you ever have a situation where you need to transfers files from one computer to another?

How about sharing files with other people that you’re working with, or making files available for a download to a group?

Have you ever worried about losing your files because of  a hard drive failure or a corrupt file of some sort?

Then you need to check out Dropbox!  Dropbox is a new online App that acts as storage for files, easy transfer between computers, backup and even saves revisions of working files for you.

There are lots of other ways to do what Dropbox does – network sharing, flash drives, emailing files, even other internet applications can duplicate some of what Dropbox does, but I haven’t seen anything that’s as easy to use and works this cleanly and quickly.

The application is free for less than 2 Gigabytes of storage so there’s really no reason not to check it out.

In fact, if you use this link Dropbox Signup, then both of us will qualify for extra space.

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below!

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

One of the benefits / curses for what I do is always looking for new things to learn.  I sign up for newsletters, I subscribe to blogs, I check Twitter and LinkedIn for what people are finding and talking about.  In the last week, I ran across two very different articles that had a very similar message.

Coincidentally – a variation of this topic is coming up in discussions with clients, especially in my Peer Group advisory boards.  The topic?  What does it take to succeed?  Or put more practically, what is the 1 thing everyone could put into practice today and instantly be successful?

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  photo by uberculture 

I hate car shopping – it’s not quite as bad as a root canal or re-grouting tile, but I certainly wouldn’t call it fun. For starters, you’re looking at buying a hugely expensive piece of equipment that loses 25% of it’s value as soon as you drive it off the lot. On top of that, you generally have to run the gauntlet of stereotypically bad sales techniques (and salespeople).

However at some point you’re going to need a different vehicle, so we decided to bit the bullet.  The car industry is in bad shape right now, so you would think that they would be pulling out all the stops to make a sale.  I was interested to see if the buying process had improved since the last time I had been car shopping.

We set out to visit 3 car dealers for test drives and found 3 very different situations:  Read on to see what happened last weekend! (how’s that for a tease?)

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You’d like to make more money, you’d like to have more time in the day, you’d really just like things to run better.  However the system you have is perfectly designed for the results that you’re getting.  In other words, if you want a different outcome, then you’re going to need to make some changes.

Change – that’s a tricky thing.  A few months ago I wrote about the Formula for Change that explains the different components it takes to overcome the resistance to change.  In large organizations, that resistance can take on many forms, but for business owners, most of the time the resistance can be found between your ears!

While it’s important to figure out the technical side of what you want to change (i.e. new process, system or whatever) it’s more important to get a handle on what your resistance is and where it’s coming from.

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