Mike Taylor, the former Taylor Engineering Inc. president who was named Spokane's city engineer late last year, has developed and has begun marketing a software application, called StrengthsMapper, that's designed to help individuals and teams work to their personal strengths.

Taylor says he began selling the application commercially last week through P. Mike Taylor LLC, a Spokane company he set up a year and a half ago that's doing business as StrengthsMapper.com. He says he expects the application to appeal both to individuals interested in personal growth and development and to businesses and other organizations that want to organize members of teams in positions that best suit their natural talents or traits.

The basic software module, targeted at individuals, sells for $37, and a version designed for team building sells for $187. The application is what's called an add-in, a smaller program that must be used in conjunction with another program—in this case, one called Mindjet MindManager, which Taylor says has sold about 1.5 million copies worldwide.

"I think it's a really important tool for right now because, what with corporate downsizing, people are saying, 'What do I have to work with?' and, 'How can I accomplish my mission best?' There are an awful lot of midlevel managers who would really benefit from it," Taylor says.

He says he expects it to appeal particularly to the so-called Gen X and Gen Y demographic groups because they "grew up with computers and are more free-thinking folks, younger folks" who are "not ego-bound or constrained to artificial things like turf and title."

MindManager, sold by San Francisco-based Mindjet, is an application used for "mind mapping" and interactive collaboration and is designed to help executives, managers, and others overcome information overload, work more efficiently, and be more productive.

Mind mapping, in a nutshell, involves using diagrams to display graphically the relationships between workers, job responsibilities, ideas, or other pieces of information, and is used as an aid in solving problems, making decisions, and structuring organizations. Strength-based management involves identifying people's strengths, or natural talents or traits, and placing them in positions that allow them to make the best use of those strengths.

Gallup Consulting, a global company that specializes in employee and customer management, came up with the concept of strengths-based management years ago, and Taylor says he had been using it for a number of years at Taylor Engineering.

He says he also had gotten involved in mind mapping, and decided the two concepts could work well together in personal- and organizational-improvement scenarios. He created the software during his spare time over about the last two years, he says, with help from a software developer and Web-site developer he learned of through Mindjet.

Taylor says he's selling the software strictly as a side business venture, and is contracting for the production and delivery of the software.

"I'll just staff it up to manage it and manage it on the side" if it grows to the point where that's necessary, he says, adding that he has no intention of leaving his position with the city. "My first passion is this place right here," he says, "and I've got my hands full."