Another great business blog post from the creative mind of John Jantsch links to a powerful Business Model YOU concept. In the movie, City Slickers, we are told the meaning of life is ONE Thing.

Jantsch correctly points out that every organization's customer should be able to relate to ONE Thing about the organization. It's just as vital for every manager to understand that ONE Thing about their business as it is for each of us to understand our meaning of life and its ONE Thing.

Business Model YOU Workshops teach adults how to better understand the dynamics of their careers. Personal Business Model mapping is first taught but the process doesn't stop there. Every Business Model is seen as a blueprint of a person's career. In making a blueprint for a building, an architect needs to first know the Purpose of that building. Although Purpose is not an element of the blueprint, it is the engine that drives its design.

A Personal Business Model needs the same overall design engine. It needs a personal Purpose. While it may be easy to learn how to create an organizational Business Model, it is much harder to create one for your own life because its so hard to know what your own Purpose might be. It's also easy just to read the book and not really struggle with the work recommended in this area. That's one of the many values Workshops bring to those interested in Career Reinvention. A Workshop participant has to actually do the hard work of looking inside themselves to find their own Purpose, which is their ONE Thing.

An overlooked side benefit of these workshops is that once you have been through the process of creating your own Personal Business Model, when you approach your next organization Business Model you do so with an orientation of finding and building the organization's Purpose as well. You will have ONE Thing instincts!

It's Valentine's Day and the co-creators of Business Model YOU are happily receiving their first editions of this ground-breaking new workbook. The original idea was really simple; apply the creativity of Business Model Generation to individuals and their careers. The result would be a Personal Business Model (PBM).

On the surface, it is that easy. What caught us by surprise was actually working with a Personal Business Model was not at all like working with an organizational Business Model. The difference is that it's easy and fun to brainstorm with a group on what is "out there" in any organization. That process is very different when it's now about what "inside here" or your personally chosen career path. The  9 model elements of career reinvention are almost the same as in business reinvention; but working with them is far more challenging. Helping you through that challenge is what Business Model YOU is all about.

I have come to believe that anyone seeking to be a great organizational Business Model practitioner needs to first understand and work through the Personal Business Model process. There is a forced change in your point of view that improves your ability to now work with organizations in much more meaningful ways. Let's take Valentine's Day as an example.

Valentine's Day is not about who loves you; but is the day you have a chance to appreciate how wonderful it is to have someone in your life you can love. It may not be a spouse; but a friend, associate, or even pet that shares your life. The important thing is that there seems to be a purpose to love another built inside every one of us and on this day we take the time to find some way to express to them, in some way they will appreciate, how much this means to us.

Those relationships are not missed in Business Model YOU. It looks at the impacts of our career purpose and multiple roles in life. Then we need to deal with the Customer Relationship element of our Business Model. Everyone working with Business Models knows the two basic Customer Relationships that we enter into this block, Acquisition or Retention. What gets stressed in Business Model YOU is that this is not from the organization's perspective, it's from your Customer's. The real question here is how do our Customers want us to relate to them?

Because almost every organization has spent time on CRM, we are oriented to thinking how we want to relate to our customers; but that is backwards. How does our customer want us to relate to them? In spite of what all the Facebook consultants tell me to believe, I have no desire to be in a Retention relationship with, let's say my plumber (and "like" their Facebook page). I want them to be easily Acquired when I need them (and appear a the top of my Google search on demand). On the other hand, I may want my doctor to want me to "like" his Facebook page and to take an interest in what is going on in my life.

Today I am reminded how personal and important these relationships are. Because I have worked on Personal Business Models I also see the relevance to all Business Models in a way that was obscure before.

To all those who have been a part of this rewarding effort, Happy Valentine's Day.

It sounds odd; but first we Grow Up and then we Grow Down. We spend 30 to 60 years accumulating relationships, skills, knowledge, assets, and responsibilities, only to have them successively removed until at the end of another 30 to 60 years we leave with nothing. That's assuming everything has worked out well; but even working out well doesn't seem to be in today's forecast.

Our culture prepares us to grow up. As we become capable, opportunities to expand our purposes are presented to us. We become used to "adding" more to our lives, a family, friends, an education, a career, our own family, financial and other assets. The challenge is adjusting to adding onto yet another part of our lives. But somewhere at some point, we all shockingly find ourselves losing an unrecoverable part of our life.

It could be loss of a career, a loved one, financial assets, or even our health. Not an opportunity to move on; but a real unrecoverable loss. Years of growing up leave us completely unprepared. No one has ever taught us how to handle the challenges of going "downhill".

If life has a purpose (and we all have to take a position of this), then we are faced with the conclusion that this process is one of personal focus. Life narrows itself to focus us on our extended purposes. Removing any significant piece of our personal life system causes everything else to lose its former purpose. The resulting emotional turmoil is often debilitating.

The process of Personal Reinvention has helped many facing this life crisis. Some have worked through this themselves, others have taken advantage of self-help, and many are now trying Personal Reinvention Workshops. The methods start with the remaining pieces (resources) and views them through the lens of your life history. A new, more focused, purpose can emerge if you seek it.

Although we use Personal Business Models as our tool, the results may not relate to business at all. We often find our purpose in service to others. Finding that service will put the meaning into Growing Down.

Reinvention is a basic Life Skill we all need. While working on the Personal Business Model materials for Business Model You I had adults going through a life crisis in mind. As I have been involved in the development of that Reinvention process, I now keep finding more applications.

Here I am speaking to the Tri Delta sorority at UTA as a part of their Academic development program. This was not just about how you can make better grades; but why you would want to.

Everyone agrees, you make better grades in courses that are interesting to you. The place to start improving academic performance may not be study methods.  Start by understanding what will cause any course to be interesting to YOU. To be interesting, the material has to have some personal meaning.

After an initial exercise, it was easy to demonstrate at the seminar that everyone is a unique mixture of useful, often unknown, attributes. Why is that? I believe it's because we all have a unique purpose. Reinvention is about rediscovering and re-centering on that unique purpose. The sorority is a wonderful place for students in one of life's biggest transitions to help each other identify their unique attributes and discover how these fit together to form a Purpose statement. For some of them, it was easy. For others, it will develop over time.

As statements of purpose become evident, it becomes easier to link Key Activities, in this case academic work, to what means something to YOU. Instead of being concerned about what you have to do for a class, consider what does this class have to teach you to help achieve your purpose? Knowing that is the game-changer.

I started thinking game-changing was all about working with business organizations. Wrong, it's a fundamental of life we all need to personally master.