Let me say first off that meeting Carolyn Ruth Meyer is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and that should be no surprise to anyone who knows we just got married June 26th, 2009.  What you may not know is that her time is also going to be the best thing that’s happened to SelfReliant LLC – which recently was renewed in WA State as a dual-member LLC, with Carolyn and I sharing co-ownership.  You see, we met at Duke, and experienced many of the same fascinating revelations regarding the changing educational landscape.  The discovery of educational currency theory and microenterprise education, which are now both trademark ideas of SR, was largely a co-discovery.  I still remember the time Carolyn and I took the bus to Chapel Hill and sat in a restaurant discussing grading structure and function.  “Why couldn’t we subdivide the entire grade system much more finely,” the conversation went, “So the whole of formal education could function on a currency-like points system.”

Since we’ve gotten settled here in Raleigh, Carolyn and I have made great strides in working together on the company.  The plan now is to completely redesign the website and open a new virtual headquarters in Second Life.  This blog too, will move to a WordPress installation on our server, SelfReliantLLC.com, and the site will also link out to our new Twitter and Facebook accounts.  A great vision, and one I’ve had for some time, but how can we be sure of implementation?  I’ll tell you how – we’ve discovered a secret that all 2-founder small businesses should try:  I call it “co-managerial authority granting”.

Co-Managerial Authority Granting?

OK, that’s probably way too buzzwordy – I mean, I’m not an MBA or something, so it may be a little over the top.  But it works like this.  Every morning, Carolyn and I have agreed to wake up at the same time (a crucial part), and right now that’s 8 AM.  For the first 4 hours of the day I’m her employee, and for the second 4 hours of the day, she’s my employee.  Even though we’re both technically 50/50 owners in the LLC, this system works extraordinarily well.  My guess is that it works because Carolyn’s priority task list will always be slightly different than my own.  So when we’re working for each other during each time slot, we literally check in and ask the other what to do next.  Yesterday I asked her to read a chapter in Informal Learning by Jay Cross and to shred some old junk papers.  Today she’s asked me to write this blog post chronicling our progress using this new technique. The benefit of being an “employee” for 4 hours is that we will still become manager in the next 4 hours, when we can get done whatever is most personally important as well as delegate tasks to the other.  So right now Carolyn’s working on Twitter and yesterday she was getting iPhone work done, while I was filing papers that had been left to clutter our office floor for over a week.

So SelfReliant 2.0 is just SelfReliant 1 + 1, but I venture to guess that the addition will yield something greater than the sum of its parts.  I look forward to many great changes ahead – like cleaning up our web presence, clarifying the business plan, and perhaps even hiring our first employee.  Please stay tuned, because we’ve never been quite this productive before, and I see only bigger and better things to come!