Best Of Zen

Recalibrating Normal

Five years ago, I wrote an article for Association Management magazine--now Association Now--in response to the editor's question: "When will things return to normal?" My answer? "Maybe normal isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Maybe we lost our way when we became so professional that we lost touch with the passion of those who founded our associations."

That rant was the cover story in December 2003, Recalibrating Normal, challenging association professionals to return to what really matters by starting with the right questions.

"What if your association could attract the next generation of volunteers with a mission that matters and activities that also deliver personal and professional growth--financial success as well as a more equitable society?" 

• What if we were a movement, not an industry?
• What if values created value?
• What if members were our products, not our customers?
• What if work was a calling, not a career?

If you're an ASAE and Center for Association Leadership member, you can find the original article online here.   You can also download it at amazon.com. 

In this post-abundance era, maybe these questions will provoke another round of responses. Over the next few weeks, I will pick up and examine these questions again in this space.

What Color Is Your Parachute?

If your parachute isn't golden, you might be looking for some help finding your way to your calling, your next career move or your legacy.   So here's an exercise that not only helps you look in a mirror, but to see yourself as others do.

Try this at a meeting to create greater self-awareness and groupsourced career counseling in less than 30 minutes. Alchemist Chris Grant designed this exercise for The Vine and called it resume unbound. 

Giving us five minutes, Chris had each of us write out two or three phrases under three headings on a single piece of paper:

• my values at work
• the value I add
• skills, characteristics and qualities.

Then, you and the person sitting next to you take five minutes to exchange resumes, explaining what you have written before standing up and wandering the room holding your partner's resume.  In the next five minutes, you must talk to at least three people, pairing up to ask what they would do if they could borrow the person you represent for a year.   With surprising answers in hand, you return to your original partner to download life-altering career suggestions.

My partner was the ultimate blend of Jim Collins and Deprok Chopra.  He came back with three suggestions for me:  run a think tank; be a facilitator and consensus builder; or become a community organizer.   Works for me and it makes a much better elevator speech!

A Future By Design

Strategic planning is under attack by those either frustrated by its misuse or incapable of harnessing its power.  Just look at the litany of failures summarized in a sad commentary by Jim Hallon, CAE, in the current issue of Associations Now. 

Luckily, for those who see strategic planning as the means to engage members in a conversation about their own future and their association as the means to change it, there is a new edition of ASAE and the Center's environmental scan by Rohit Talwar of Fast Future Research, due to be released later this month. 

Compared to other so-called strategic exercises of the recent past that were little more than painful recitations of the obvious, the new environmental scan, Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Association and Nonprofit Leaders, is an extraordinary achievement. 

Reading it, I am reminded of Lester Thurow, my all time favorite economist on the speaker circuit, who in 45 minutes can reduce terrifying geopolitical and economic forces to a virtual adventure game, drop you in the center of the action, and arm you with the weapons to fight your way out.

Designing Your Future confronts some extremely unpleasant realities, reduces the most significant to sets of patterns, and offers up alternative responses, each of which produces a bubble of hope.  The case studies make it tangible, the methodology is persuasive.  And a failure of imagination will render it completely useless, protecting you from less adept competitors.

Use tools like Designing Your Future and strategic planning to create a shared dream, mobilizing the people who can achieve it together.  Otherwise, like Jim, you will have to learn to live with disappointment.

CMO--Chief Marketing Officer

Working for associations, I long ago realized that my member is my product, not my customer.  Think about it. 

What does your association do?  If you represent your members, promote what they do or advance their interests, members are your product.  Sure they must access your services and you need to spell their names right, but if you want to be the Chief Marketing Officer, not brochure girl or sales guy, you need to be clear about the gameboard.

Ideally, the very fact of joining sets your members apart from nonmember competitors. How?  It might be adherence to a code of ethics, a guarantee, or a promise to uphold voluntary standards.  In some cases it is merely identifying with your mission, your purpose.  If you are an 'honest broker,' members align with your reputation.

So are you promoting that difference to those whom members serve or just selling stuff to members?  Are you setting the agenda for internal budget meetings or are you defending promotion budgets, hiding behind net revenue projections? 

If you are a true CMO, not brochure girl or sales guy, you know that your member is your product and that distinction affects how you approach pricing, where you invest your promotion dollars, and how you design your website.

For example, if members are your product, continuing education must be product enhancement. By definition, your members are Release 3.0 when nonmembers are in Beta.  As anyone can buy education workshops, though, what sets your members apart? Mandatory continuing education, not mandatory purchase of your continuing education offerings, could be the difference and send a powerful signal to members' potential customers, clients or employers, as well as regulators and industry watchdogs. 

Government affairs staff argue that if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.  True CMOs own the table. 

Megacommunities for Megaproblems

This week our field staff and local volunteer leaders are in town to regroup, recharge, and restore each other before jumping back into the fray next month.  Hearing their plans for next year, I can only admire how they are widening their influence. We are now being sought out by elected officials, environmental groups, community activists, even Wall Street investment bankers as the people who know how to get things done.

After 15 years at ULI, I am delighted with our 'overnight' success.  Just as climate change and failing infrastructure are becoming popular causes, we are in a position to do something about both, bringing together megacommunities to take on megaproblems. 

"The megacommunity concept goes far beyond such well-meaning single-sector approaches as sustainable development or corporate social responsibility, both of which often represent an ongoing obligation or duty rather than a collective movement toward a mutual aim," according to the authors of The Defining Features of a Megacommunity published in Strategy + Business (6/12/07).

"Unlike public–private partnerships, which typically focus on relatively narrow purposes... megacommunities take on much larger goals...A megacommunity initiative combines focused conversation, deliberate development of leadership capabilities, and results-oriented action in an open-ended network of leaders from multiple organizations." 

That's exactly what we are doing.  Now that some smart guys at Booz Allen Hamilton have defined it, maybe others will take a closer look at what our District Councils in Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., are doing.  Their ongoing work is producing megacommunities in these metropolitan areas to take on megaproblems. Stay tuned.

  Download leading_ideas-20070612.pdf

What I have learned

Last month, Jeff  De Cagna and Lisa Junker posted some simple truths about what each had learned, and I have been stewing on how best to add to the dialog.  So here are my top five.

It’s not about you.  Really. Attract people to something larger. Find your calling.  Make it your day job.   

Generate energy. Don’t waste it. Create more heat, and light, than you expend. Change the rules. Reframe the dialog so you own the space.

Know less. Get answers to questions you are not asking. Hire to your weakness. Stop getting in your own way.

Learn one. Do one. Teach one. Repeat.  Learn from others. Learn from experience. Learn from those you teach.  Professionals practice.

People are the whole point.  It really doesn’t matter what this year’s issue is, or what we do about it.  It’s how we engage people, grow and change, personally and professionally,  and leave us all the better for it.

Golf Lessons

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a special report on golf, no doubt due to the upcoming Masters and advertising from FedEx with a golf tie-in.  The lead article, How Golf Went Off Course, examined recent efforts to increase the number of golfers, and revealed a number of lessons for associations looking for ways to grow membership.

For although golf recruited three million new players in recent years, an equal number abandoned the game. 

Consider the obstacles.  New golfers do not have much fun.  Until you master the grip and gain a consistent swing, golf is misery—a nice walk ruined.  And, then, there’s the amount of time it take to play golf, much less get good at it.  A round of golf shoots a day.  In a time-starved, instant-gratification world, golf would appear to be doomed. 

Some advocate dual standards to loosen up the rules on equipment, allowing technology to give novices the ability to make a decent drive, and have more fun.  Others advocate playing just six holes, to reduce the time commitment. But how do you improve without playing?

To grow your association, do you have to lower standards, sacrifice integrity and abandon time-honored traditions? Ski resorts adapted, carving out a place for skiboarders, and bolstering sagging profits from a shrinking population of downhill purists.  Baseball lives on due to softball leagues, T-ball, and television.  Is golf next?

According to the Journal story, more than 28 million Americans now play golf, half of whom play at least eight rounds a year and are considered ‘core golfers.’  Given that only one-fourth of golfers account for two-thirds of all sales, can’t growth also come from increasing the number of rounds played by those other 14 million people?

My husband Bill played golf in high school, but never more than a round or two a year for the last thirty years. Now that he is retired, he plays at least three times a week.  In eighteen months, he has dropped his score to the low 80s and I can guarantee that he is having fun.  Yesterday, he shot a 78.  Today, he won’t, but the hunt is on.

Bill is proof that golf will grow.  That’s right! It’s demographics.  Boomers are retiring, they have money, and they intend to live forever by staying active.

For associations, it is not a question of growing or not growing, it is a question of how we grow. Beyond the stats, it’s how we grow people—strengthening the resolve of the most recent recruits to achieve mastery, and strengthening the involvement of passive members lurking in the wings.

Stewardship of a Knowlege Ecology

The Fall 2006 edition of the Journal of Association Leadership features an article that is more like a survey course of current thinking on knowledge creation, culture, and collaboration. Written by Andre N. Mamprin, Next Institute (Calgary), Designing Knowledge Ecologies for Associations makes the case that leadership, not technology, is the basis of knowledge ecologies, according to Journal editors.

Knowledge ecologies and communities of practice require a light hand. "Balancing the highly structured, methodical, and organized portion of the association while allowing for creative thinking, serious play, and exploration is an attribute that leaders of knowledge ecologies share,"  Mamprin says.

Seems that a metaphor of associations as knowledge ecologies demands a metaphor of leadership as stewardship.That approach was first proposed by Peter Block in his 1993 book, Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest and could be another survey course for the Journal of Association Leadership.

Investor Relations

Selling advertising and exhibit booths is a numbers game.  Circulation, impressions, response rates, traffic, and retention are the metrics.  It's a straight-forward value proposition.  Or is it?  Competitive pressure, established channels, customer expectations, and the non-profit's ultimate weapon--guilt--shape these so called business decisions. 

Pressured by rising costs and member expectations, we scramble to balance the budget. We find new advertising opportunities. We add questionable non-dues revenue discount schemes to increase member benefits. We tell members that selling their contact information will provide "valuable offers." 

It's time to raise the stakes.  Our advertising sales staff believe that they are in the "investor relations"  business. They engage the top-decision makers, the people who can direct ad agencies where to spend their money, and create a space for them to differentiate themselves, and their offering. 

Make no mistake.  Our sales vp makes hard-nosed business offers, but she doesn't stop with the sale.  She extends the relationship, introduces CEOs to potential partners, and engages them in the organization where they can meet on neutral ground.

Mission-driven organizations attract influential industry leaders, not only those working in the field, but also their customers, their regulators, and their business partners.  Advertisers and sponsors are eager to align with groups that command strong emotional ties with their most important customers. 

Aim higher. Use your power for good.

Web 4.0

Yesterday, a foundation gave us a gift worth more than $10 million.  It wasn't a grant. It was their story of creating a web portal over the last seven years and their "overnight success" after many dead ends and false starts.

No Harvard case study could have captured the issues so succinctly.  In 45 minutes, we heard the lessons learned on oversight and governance, staffing and contractors, communications and marketing, partnerships and licensing, custom and open source code.

It was a tutorial--business Haiku.  Even the most technology battle-hardened were in awe. It changed the room and deflected us away from technology chatter to explore the significant ways we could create value.

And, although we will stand on their shoulders, we will no doubt ignore some of these warnings in our own quest.  But, for now, I am grateful for this gift. 

I am grateful that our volunteers who had flown into Washington for a task force meeting at their own expense could be present for this performance.  I am grateful for having a new standard for generosity of time and experience, and I will try to be as generous with others who can benefit from what we learn.

So it goes.