New year resolution

“You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within.”
Bob Nelson.

Sports present an interesting parallel to the business world due to their single-minded focus on a goal, with members of successful teams tending to share a common focus. It’s also interesting that the best in the world tend to seek the assistance of coaches to make them even better. Take tennis for example. Both of the current world number ones (Raphael Nadal and Serena Williams) look to coaches for guidance. Tiger Woods has been the world number one for 662 weeks (and still going) but even he is coached.

According to the rankings, there is nobody better in the world than these three individuals but they all still seek the counsel of coaches.

Can a coach / mentor / consultant take your (or your team’s) OSS expertise to another level this year? Or more granularly, what goals have you set yourself for 2014 and can external help potentially get you to those goals faster?

I’m not one for making new year’s resolutions, but one of my goals is to reach and assist more people. To do so, my finite goals are:

• To increase by 25% the number of subscribers to this blog, who receive daily updates directly to their mailbox. [A big thank-you to those who are already subscribed]
• To increase by 25% the daily hit rate on this site
• This can only happen if the content is relevant to a broader number of users, so I greatly appreciate questions / suggestions that have specific relevance to you. Hopefully I can do justice in answering them here
• I will actively seek counsel of even more thought leaders with relevance to this field. Whose guidance would you recommend (in or out of OSS)?

Since there are no world rankings in OSS (that I’m aware of at least), who is the best in the world at this OSS caper in your opinion and why? What can I and the readers of this blog learn from them?