This weekend I taught a three-hour session on Systems to students in Georgetown’s Organization Development and Change Leadership Certificate program. I went through this program 11 years ago myself (though it didn’t have the “change leadership” moniker back then). I love teaching this class and digging into the idea that when we get together in [...]
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Maddie tagged me in a “how are you going to change the world in 2012″ meme in a blog post last week. She was inspired by this post by Craig Newmark, and now she’s asked a whole host of us to talk about what we’re going to do in 2012 and how we’re going to [...]
Continue ReadingI suppose that sounds obvious, but when I talk to people about changing the way they lead and manage organizations, I’m not so sure it’s that obvious. Instead, there seems to be a default assumption that in the future, management will look roughly like it does today, except that somehow it will be better and [...]
Continue ReadingA few weeks ago, Maddie and I were interviewed about Humanize by Les McKeown. Les is a best-selling author of a book titled Predictable Success, and we were interviewed for his blog. I was really impressed with him during the interview. His questions were intelligent and showed how deeply he understood what we were talking [...]
Continue ReadingEverybody hates organizational silos. They are a problem. They get in the way. They need to be “busted.” And to some extent, I agree. The way our different departments seem to erect walls separating them from each other can definitely cause problems. What one department does ends up producing a result that causes trouble for [...]
Continue ReadingI have had the book Race for Relevance: 5 Radical Changes for Associations for a couple of months now, wanting to do a review here in the blog. I struggled a bit, though, because I am of two minds about the book. There is a lot in this book I really like. Coerver and Byers do [...]
Continue ReadingIn Chapter 3 of Humanize, we make the case that organizations, in general, are not adapting fast enough to our changing times. And we don’t pull any punches. We actually say that best practices are “evil.” We suggest (citing well-researched books that say the same thing) that strategic planning flat out doesn’t work. We put [...]
Continue ReadingThanks to David Patt, whose comment on an Acronym post pointed me to a really good article by Matthew Forti about measurement for nonprofits. The Acronym post was from Scott Briscoe, building off of Joe Rominiecki’s notion of “loveable losers,” those programs associations have that lose money but provide enough value to justify the negative [...]
Continue ReadingI already did an overall recap post on the ASAE Annual Meeting over on the Common Thread blog with some big picture reactions to the event. Here I wanted to dig into some of the issues a little more deeply, and there’s one that I have been stewing over for a couple of days now. [...]
Continue ReadingAs I mentioned last week on the SocialFish blog, social organizations are serious about learning. Not just learning at conferences, but deep organizational learning. While I doubt there are many who would argue against me on that (who's going to say that learning is a bad idea?), I still don't see a whole lot of [...]
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Jamie is a Vice President at MSP where he leads the consulting division. 
