Well, it's the end of day one for our Never Work Alone project, and I've just posted the first summary post on our blog. The scenario we discussed was this one:

A customer comes into a business and asks to buy a product and bill them in a certain way. The person at the counter didn't know how to bill the customer for the product in that way. The customer got frustrated and took their business elsewhere.

The first post is a good example of the kind of discussion you can expect from Never Work Alone, and we would love to have more people involved. So, come on over, discover our insights and get involved in this new endeavour of ours.

And why not do us a favor and pass it along to others if you like what you see?

If you work in a corporate environment, you may find yourself in situations where you really wish you had a sounding board so you could either ask for advice or float ideas and get feedback.

Well, wish no longer. Bren of Slacker Manager, Skip of Random Thoughts from a CTO, and I are happy to announce that we've established a resource to provide community based assistance to all of us in corporate environments, particularly those of us in management and leadership roles. This new resource is called Never Work Alone.

What’s Never Work Alone all about?
We’ve all been through “trial by fire” management situations, and have faced difficult management and leadership dilemmas at various points in our careers. As active participants in the brain trust on the internet, we also understand the tremendous power of Community.

The goal of Never Work Alone is to provide a community for managers and leaders to share their experiences and challenges, help each other grapple with issues, learn from each other, and advance the state of the art in enlightened leadership.

How Does It Work?
We’re launching a blog and a Google group. The Google group is at http://groups.google.com/group/neverworkalone. Initially, the blog (http://neverworkalone.typepad.com) will be a weekly summary of a situation that’s reflected upon in the Google group.

We’ll solicit situation ideas via this email address: neverworkalone@gmail.com.

Each week we’ll select a situation and post it to the Google group. Group members can offer suggestions for how to handle the situation. Each week we’ll summarize the situation and responses on the blog, crediting the appropriate respondents and including links to their blogs/websites.

Of course, we fully expect that the Google group won’t be used exclusively for going over the situations. We encourage folks to go ahead and post what they’ve got and see what comes back. We’re doing the structured approach so that people with limited time, but who’d like to participate, will know where to focus their energy.

So come on in, check it out, participate, and let us know how we can make this better!