I 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 [...]
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A 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 [...]
Continue ReadingThanks to everyone who came to my session at the AAFP Annual Leadership Forum to hear me talk about creating tomorrow's organizations today. Feel free to download a PDF of the slides. (UPDATE: I fixed the link. Sorry about that!)
Continue ReadingIn my March e-newsletter, the question of the month was, basically, "What are you going to stop doing?" I have loved this theme for a long time (maybe Jim Collins was the first time I remember it being presented clearly?), but it came up twice at Great Ideas last week. First in the General Session [...]
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Jamie is a Vice President at MSP where he leads the consulting division. 
