Welcome to the very first issue of The Connector. We are pleased to have you as a member of our ever-expanding community! And we've designed this on-line magazine as a way to keep you "in the loop" on what's happening at HPS, as well as to provide news and ideas that come from across the community of active practitioners of Systems Thinking. Our goal in publishing The Connector, as it is with our products and services, is to help increase the level of shared understanding among the extended HPS community.

As part of fulfilling our mission to help increase your capacity for building and communicating understanding, we've increased the types and frequency of service offerings we provide. Please check out the HPS Offerings section shown on the first page of this magazine. There you will first learn about our brand new workshop, Taking it to the Next Level. If you've already developing some modeling skills by attending one of our introductory workshops and you want to increase those skills, Taking it to the Next Level is for you!

In addition to announcing new products and services, each issue of The Connector will include articles from HPS staff members, as well as contributions from our readers. Some of the HPS-written columns will provide news about HPS that's important for members of our extended community to know. An example of this type of article is Jessica Richmond's "From the President" column. We'll include other HPS-written columns to demonstrate and teach useful applications of our products and services. Check out "The Story of the Month" for an excellent example of this type of column. This month's story "The College Crunch" shows how the Systems Thinking skillset can help build understanding of crises affecting many academic institutions today, as well as a number of other fiscal problems experienced today.

And for those of you who wish to build a little more Systems Thinking muscle, we've developed a column specifically for you! Our Systems Thinking Puzzler asks you to use an issue we describe as an opportunity to test how you might use Systems Thinking and the iThink®/STELLA® software to analyze and explain that issue.

It's not enough for us to create all the material! We hope each issue will include at least one article from members of the Systems Thinking community (like you!). We were fortunate to have Peter Senge be our first contributor. (Thanks a lot, Peter!) If you wish to be more than just a reader of this magazine-if you'd like to share your experience or ideas with others in the HPS community-please let us know! We'd love to have you participate in future issues of the magazine.

In closing, I wish to express how fortunate I feel to have the opportunity to serve you as managing editor of "The Connector". Please write me at csoderquist@hps-inc.com if you'd like to contribute to The Connector, or if you have any feedback you'd like to pass on to us at HPS. As Systems Thinkers, we wish to keep the feedback signal clear-and with little delay!

Stay in touch!