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As we celebrate Smart Irrigation Month, it's a great time to highlight not only smart technologies, but the smart people and smart decisions behind them. One remarkably smart tool that ties all three of those elements together is the Irrigation Consumer Bill of Rights by Dr. Charles Burt of the Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo.

Business people love to talk about "disruption." They pride themselves on eating their competitors' lunch. Where their markets used to be about raving fans, now it's about inspiring craving fans, fueled by "hunger marketing" and the fear of missing out. There's a lot of dog-eat-dog philosophy...which is why it's important for companies to be willing to cannibalize their own technologies.

This blog is a summary of a presentation I gave at the Water Quality Association’s annual convention in Orlando.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool not just to connect with potential customers, job seekers and peers, but to position yourself and your company as thought leaders in your industry. With more than 400 million members—including over 100 million active users—1 million specialty groups, and its powerful Pulse news aggregator, LinkedIn is a global conversation space and a forum for sharing great ideas whenever the mood strikes you, 24 hours a day.

Many publishing experts claim that after writing excellent copy for your eBook (see my last post, Becoming a Writer, Mapper and Synthesizer), the next most important thing to do is create a good cover design. As Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, states: “A great cover design makes a promise to the reader.”

Mind mapping to design your cover can help you keep that promise.

In my last blog post, I wrote about how to use mind mapping to discover the reasons you would want to publish an eBook. Once you’ve established that, the next step is to actually write the book — which can seem an incredibly daunting task.

So, I enlisted the help of authors who literally and figuratively wrote the books on writing: Anne Lamott with Bird By Bird, Stephen King’s On Writing, The Artist’s Way’s Julia Cameron with The Right to Write, and screenwriter Robert McKee’s Story. After re-reading each book with an eye on how mind mapping might be most beneficial to the writing process, I came away with one clear answer: synthesizing.

If you want to get somewhere, you need a map. That’s why when my wife Laurie (yes, that’s right, she’s Laurie Lauria) suggested that I publish an eBook on my experiences getting money back from big companies, I immediately turned to Mindjet’s MindManager to map the project. My relationship with Mindjet began in 1999 when Laurie showed me an article about mind mapping software she found in an airline magazine. She had seen me hand-drawing mind maps that I used to enhance my creativity for problem solving. She recognized that since I was both an engineer and a writer, a software tool that would allow me to use both my left brain and right brain would be quite beneficial.