Was that nugget of valuable information that could impact your company's future success from an expert that you listened to during a keynote address or a workshop? Was it from an exhibitor at the event? Possibly.

But chances are that kernel of wisdom came from one of your peers - another company's owner or a senior leader of a company.

"When you get advice from your peers, you know that it's true, sincere, and based on experience," comments Wayne Messick, lifelong consultant to management of privately held businesses and author of Realize Your Personal and Business Potential: The 21st Century Peer Group Process.

If only you could maintain ongoing contact with those individuals who work in your industry across the country and share successes and challenges. Well, you can.

Business to business peer groups that provide circular mentoring or reciprocal coaching opportunities (to use the trendy terms), allow you to brainstorm regarding issues, ideas and solutions with people who have dealt with similar problems and situations.

Brainstorming and Collaboration
In-person brainstorming groups or teams are often the best mechanism to foster innovation. And many companies go out of their way to establish a supportive environment to encourage employees to make suggestions for new products, new processes and to effect change.

It's the collective brainpower of a trusted group gathering together to feed from the insights of others to create additional and better ideas and solutions. A small group of people whose opinions you value and respect can stimulate everything from new product ideas to troubleshooting and problem solving.

They can provide sound and honest feedback and ask challenging questions that can stimulate you to sharpen your thinking and better analyze the strategies that you're considering.

Even in college, the same style of learning and creative thinking is followed. For example, in college communication courses, group or teamwork has historically been used as the foundation for semester-long research projects. Combining professorial lectures, textbook reading assignments and outside readings with group process is one of the most effective means to creating an innovative conclusion.

Leaders in Isolation
But, in the business world, as we become ensconced in leadership roles, we begin to spend more time working in isolation. We make choices and decisions based on our own experiences; and unfortunately, we often make the choices and decisions in a vacuum.

This isolated form of decision making may not be the best way to make informed decisions, but interrupting your work to meet with colleagues across the country, across the region, the state, or even across town, can be extremely disruptive to your work schedule and work process.

Creating Peer Groups
So what can you do to simulate in-person brainstorming sessions without totally disrupting your workday?

Organize a peer group by telephone to create an advisory council of peers that will become a trusted source of advice, add a measure of accountability to your skill and career development initiatives and provide a sounding board for the ideas of others and yourself.

Circular mentoring and reciprocal coaching (the terms that can be used to describe peer groups) imply that groups of business owners with common industry backgrounds or common fields of expertise can engage in a form of do-it-yourself mentoring or coaching by acting as mentors and coaches to each other.

"If you go back to the original premise at the beginning of this article, that the one kernel of knowledge that you learned during a trade association conference or annual meeting came from one of your peers, then you will understand how a peer group that meets by telephone on a regular basis may become consultants, coaches and mentors for all of the other group participants," explains Messick. "A regular meeting of a self-managed peer group every other week for 90 minutes on the telephone will no doubt provide the most effective problem solving, innovative idea generating, and energy stimulating forum that you have ever experienced. The impetus for starting a business to business peer group is continuing the conversation from a trade association allowing you to build on the just-in-time advice and insights that you received at the meeting."

The peer group by telephone concept can be further expanded to use online group message boards and e-mail, sponsored by organizations such as Yahoo.com and Google.com that are generally free of charge to groups using the services.

Messick stresses an important feature of successful business to business peer groups: "Keep in mind that one of the few rules to be set at the inception of your peer group should be a spirit of confidentiality between group members. What's said in the group stays in the group."

Peer Group Topic Ideas
Some of the topics that could be covered during your telephone sessions include:

• Strategic planning - almost without fail, business owners and senior leaders note that organizational strategic planning is critical to company success. The follow-up question, "Are you engaging in strategic planning," finds most leaders citing lack of time as the reason that they don't do it. "Strategic planning is placed on the back burner or the bottom of the pile of work as the one thing that we just can't get to," notes Messick. As a focus of a peer group, planning becomes an accountable activity with periodic goals set to complete tasks and report back.

• Succession planning - this is the human element of strategic planning. "Who will be groomed for future critical senior and middle management leadership roles and how," questions Messick. "Without a clear succession plan, privately owned businesses will not have a long-term future." The peer group can help you weigh the options that you have because invariably one or more of your group's members will have dealt successfully with the succession decision you are facing.

• Leadership development - taking some of the session topics from a trade association conference and using them to expand the discussion and offer a venue to solidify skill development can double or triple the value of the investment of time and money in conference attendance. "By continuing the discussions that made you feel energized and challenged to build better leadership styles and behaviors, you will increase the value of your attendance," comments Messick. "Only by incorporating the behaviors and skills that you heard about by discussing how they relate to your needs, can you ensure that you will make use of the information that you collected during a conference."

• Day to day management and troubleshooting - the skills needed today and those needed in 2010 will vary dramatically. Messick suggests, "Stay ahead of the curve by listening to others' experiences. Find out how they get people to do the things that need to be done at their company - every day, every week, and every month. It's valuable and practical advice that you can use."

• Sales and marketing techniques and problem solving - find out what your colleagues are doing to expand their business efforts through advertising, public relations and other efforts and offer your own ideas during your peer group sessions. Find out what's working for your peers before you launch your next advertising or promotion program. Bring your customer related situations to the group to learn how your contemporaries are handling the same challenges. Brainstorm solutions.

• Increasing competitive intelligence - your access to other leaders in your industry in other regions can provide a virtual fountain of opinions and insights regarding new industry directions and trends and competitive data. "With a peer group of six or eight people, you have significantly magnified the depth of industry knowledge and insight that you can all profit from," says Messick. Imagine the results if your key supervisors and managers participated in regular conversations with their peers, too.

• Sharing tools of the trade - with a peer group, you can enjoy six to eight times the number of books that can be read, in-person training programs that can be attended as well as webinars or teleconferences. "The collective group will become virtual experts by sharing information without spending inordinate amounts of time reading, listening and attending sessions that leave little time for work," states Messick.

Peer Group Creation Advice
If you're not sure how to get started in creating a peer group, there's help available.

Wayne Messick has become such a believer in the value of self-directed peer groups in his 20 plus years of consulting, advising and coaching, that he recently put together a 40-page document or e-book with seven practical chapters to help you develop your own peer group.

The book covers topics from why and how peer groups work to creating and structuring peer groups. He includes online resources and cites other helpful books and materials.

"I am on a mission to share my firm belief that often coaching, mentoring and advising is most effective when you reach out to your peers - other business owners and leaders - for assistance," says Messick. "I put this information into a document to assist other business leaders in taking charge of their own destinies."

Peer groups are effective, convenient, and for the most part, free of cost.