Get Me Jamie Notter

Good Quotes

New blogger Maddie Grant (Ben: too early to start thinking about Rookie of the Year, and other awards?) has two outstanding quotes from her last two posts. One of her own writing and one from another blog. First her own, on the topic of strategic planning:

But I fear that the minute a strategic plan is in place, that will be the death of my being able to think and act strategically

Many seem to have a hard time even considering that the process they use to be strategic can be PRECISELY the thing that prevents you from being strategic. Don't worry, I will write more about this topic on the Association Renewal Blog. In fact, I am trying to get language down over there that moves the debate AWAY from whether or not we do strategic planning. I'll write  that soon.

The other quote she borrowed from Euan Semple:

Management is becoming about noticing and enabling rather than driving and controlling.

I think this ties in nicely to Lisa Junker's post on Acronym, that provided a definition of leadership that was similar to the one I have quoted from Peter Senge (which was picked up by an Australian association blogger, by the way). If leadership is about the capacity of the system, then management should be about building capacity as well. And you don't particularly build capacity by driving and controlling.

Comment of the Week

David Gammel posted a wise (and laugh-out-loud) comment on one of BMart's recent posts. Ben wrote up a great primer for new bloggers to the 'clump on how to be, well, actually PART of the 'clump. Bottom line: read what others write, talk about it, and link to it. So here's David's comment:

Blogging without linking is like talking loudly to no one in particular at a cocktail party. It's your prerogative to do so but don't expect anyone to stand near you.

Helooooo? Anybody Out There?

There is an interesting conversation going on across the “blogoclump” (the collection of bloggers who blog about associations) about why association executives don’t read us!

Jeff started the recent conversation with this post, and actually got seven comments (which would be a record for me). So he followed it up with another post. I weighed in with a comment on that post. Meanwhile, Fred Simmons posted on his own blog about it. And yesterday Dave Sabol (one of my favorite new additions to the blogroll) wrote a very thoughtful post about it.

The gist of my comment: I don’t get real value from a blog until I have read it consistently for a while. I can’t make the judgment based on one or two posts. But if blogs hit an executive’s radar screen, she will check them out by reading one or two posts. That might not be enough to really hook them.

I’m not sure a consensus conclusion has emerged, and I’m waiting for Dave Sabol’s next post about education. Although it does seem clear that we as a group are not putting as much effort into promoting the group of bloggers as we could (and individually, I would guess, most of us—Jeff excluded—are not marketing our blogs very actively). With our current approach, I think our readership will grow—just very slowly.

But the discussion reminds me that while we all would rather have more executives reading this content, we do have each other to bounce ideas around with, and that certainly has value for me. Sometimes the people who show up are the right ones (at least for now).

Indexed

I absolutely love a blog that Mickie Rops pointed to, called “Indexed.” The posts are simply sketches on the back of 3x5 index cards. They convey interesting points in the form of graphs and diagrams (without, as the blog says, actually having to do the math). I love it, and I’ve added it to my feeds. If I can figure out how to scan my own sketches, I promise to do some of my own, related to conflict and, per Mickie’s challenge, associations.

Guy Kawasaki's Real World

I’m still catching up with blogs after ignoring them for a week while I was at the annual meeting. There was a good post by Guy Kawasaki I want to point out, though.

Since it’s back to school time, he wrote a list of things college students need to understand before hitting the “real world” of working in organizations. He makes some good points about how what we learn in school is diametrically opposed to what happens in the real world. Here are two of my favorites from his 12-point list (I counted this time):

5. How to negotiate. Don’t believe what you see in reality television shows about negotiation and teamwork. They’re all bull shiitake. The only method that works in the real world involves five steps: (1) Prepare for the negotiation by knowing your facts; (2) Figure out what you really want; (3) Figure out what you don’t care about; (4) Figure out what the other party really wants (per Kai); and (5) Create a win-win outcome to ensure that everyone is happy. You’ll be a negotiating maven if you do this.

This is easier said than done, of course! Particularly the part about figuring out what the other party really wants. THAT is the essence of the negotiation, in my opinion.

10. How to get along with co-workers. Success in school is mostly determined by individual accomplishments: grades, test scores, projects, whatever. Few activities are group efforts. Then you go out in the real world the higher you rise in an organization, the less important your individual accomplishments are. What becomes more and more important is the ability to work with/through/besides and sometimes around others. The most important lesson to learn: Share the credit with others because a rising tide floats all boats.

What about freeloaders? (Those scum of the earth that don’t do anything for the group.) In school you can let them know how you truly feel. You can’t in the real world because bozos have a way of rising to the top of many organizations, and bozos seek revenge. The best solution is to bite your tongue, tolerate them, and try to never have them on the team again, but there’s little upside in criticizing them.

I think this is good advice, but I would push back a little about the “criticizing” part. I suppose it will depend on the situation, but I think there is room for giving “freeloaders” feedback, if done well (hint: the word “freeloader” should not be in the feedback). If you can focus on the specific behavior (or lack thereof) and the impact it had on the team project, then I think it is good. It might not change the freeloader’s behavior (and then you tolerate them and try not to have them on the team), but it’s a good habit to get into. Biting your tongue and tolerating could be the beginning of a very destructive pattern of conflict avoidance.

Mobile blogging

Sorry for this relatively substanceless post, but I need to test out the new software that I downloaded for my new Treo smartphone. It allows me to make posts (like this one) from my phone instead of my computer. This may come in handy during conferences and travel.

Boston Blog

As if I don’t have enough to do, I’ve agreed to be an author for ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership’s annual meeting blog this year, which is in Boston (where I was born and grew up, by the way). I wrote for last year’s annual meeting blog in Nashville, and it was great fun. I think the posts during the even are fantastic, but please know that we’ve started writing already. I’ve bought several books from people who will be speaking at the annual meeting, and I’ll be posting about them on the Boston Blog. So check it out.

Synthesis

I know I just posted about it, but I’m very impressed with the quality of what’s going up on the new blog from ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership (called Acronym). Guest blogger Ben Martin even referenced my post about the power of trust. His post talks about the conflict between conventional wisdom and unconventional wisdom, specifically in the context of choosing Board members by merit (unconventional) versus by the “old boy network” of who you know (conventional). The last line of his post reads:

And isn't it interesting that as 'unconventional wisdom' unseats 'conventional wisdom,' it becomes the new 'conventional wisdom'? The roles are reversed. Does it cycle like this forever?

The answer is, yes. As long as the new conventional wisdom represents a synthesis, rather than a simple choice. If the old way was simply choosing based on who you know, you don’t want the “new” way to be merely a new criteria like merit (that ignores who you know). The new way should extract the valuable parts of the old way and incorporate them into a new way. And once the new way becomes established, it’s time to come up with a new new way (again, extracting the value and incorporating it into the new solution). There may be some back and forth pattern (doesn’t it seem like we go back and forth between centralizing and decentralizing in organizations?), but hopefully it is like a spiral: back and forth, but always moving up. A lot of life follows this pattern.

What does ACRONYM Stand for?

Congratulations to ASAE & The Center for launching their own blog, under the title "Acronym." It's great to have another blog voice in the association community (hey, does this mean we have graduated and moved beyond a mere "blogoclump"?). Also thanks to them for listing my blog on their blogroll about associations.

Always Done It That Way

I've mentioned this before, but I'm one of five authors of a book we have titled, We've Always Done It That Way: 101 Things We Must Change About Associations. We've been writing the book "publically", by posting our 101 things onto a blog as we write them. I know some of my regular readers are already getting that feed.

But if you aren't, please go take a look at it over the next few weeks, because there should be a flurry of posts coming to that site. We're shooting to have this book published before the ASAE & The Center Annual Meeting, so we're approaching our internal deadline to have all the basic text written.

We are writing this book on a blog specifically because we want community feedback on our thoughts BEFORE this gets published. So please read both what we have written as well as what's coming out in the next few weeks, and provide feedback in the comments.