The Association Renewal Blog

Sometimes its SMART to be DUMB

Just a quick post today to mention an idea that's been percolating for awhile.  In our article on building strategic capacity by design, we are critical of strategic plans based on so-called "SMART" goals.  In this context, SMART is an acronym for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-based

Jamie and I have been talking about it and we believe that today and going forward it will be necessary and "smart" for associations to focus their attention on DUMB strategies and ideas.  Again, in this context, DUMB is an acronym:

Decisive...Unique...Meaningful...Bold.

It takes great insight, foresight and, yes, courage to pursue DUMB strategies and ideas and that is precisely the kind of leadership our associations need today and in the years ahead:  focused, prescient and courageous.  Leadership isn't about position, privilege and perks.  It's about responsibility and realism, reflection and risk-taking. 

So here's a challenge for you:  take a careful and sober look at your strategic plan and honestly assess how much of it falls squarely within these "DUMB" parameters.  If I may hazard a totally uninformed and context-free guess drawing on my years of experience in the association community, it will be less than five percent, and perhaps as little as zero.  If that is true, I can't think of a "smarter" way to lead your organization in the wrong direction...and that is really, really dumb!

Seat at the Table

You probably received your first copy of Associations Now, the new magazine from ASAE & The Center. I have only read the front section so far, but I thought it was good. I particularly liked the following quote from Ann Oliveri’s short article about giving Generation X a “seat at the table”:

The real story behind ULI’s membership success is not a marketing campaign or a sales contest. We simply let younger members create the association experience they want.

At ULI, there are no “leadership ladders” or bureaucratic measures of a member’s leadership potential. Every member is a leader. Don’t wait for boomers to exit before letting Gen X take charge. Just set up more tables and chairs, and get out of their way.

Refreshing!

Office of Strategy Management

As you could tell from my last post, I was jazzed by the Kaplan and Norton article in HBR about strategy, at least the first page (that had all those great quotes). Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed by the rest of the article, because its focus was on creating an “office of strategy management” in organizations. Hooray! Another level of bureaucracy!

Okay, that’s not how they intend it, and do remember that their audience for this article is very large organizations (thousands of employees), but I must admit it seems counterintuitive to say that a new organizational “office” will help an organization connect strategy and implementation.

The address this concern, though:

The creation of a central office for strategy execution may appear to risk reinforcing top-down decision making and inhibiting local initiative, but it does just the opposite. A unit with responsibility for the implementation of strategy becomes a convenient focal point for ideas that percolate up through the organization…. The OSM is a facilitating organization , not a dictating one.

That sounds good, but what about an association with a staff of ten or twenty? The concepts still apply, but substitute the letters “CEO” for OSM. Do ideas in your organization “percolate” up to the CEO? Is your CEO “facilitating” or “dictating”? Being responsible for implementation of strategy does not equate to our typical notion of being “in charge.” It requires a different kind of leadership and an atypical pattern around communication. Since this is not what people are used to, it requires much more conscious attention to these issues.

No, really, it's dead!

This is the second article in four months in Harvard Business Review that is trying to get our attention regarding the failure (or "death") of traditional strategic planning. This one is by Kaplan and Norton of "balanced scorecard" fame. Here are a few quotes from just the first page of the article (more later):

Seven out of eight companies [in a study of large companies] failed to achieve profitable growth.... Yet 90% of the companies in the study had developed detailed strategic plans with much higher targets.

Our research reveals that, on average, 95% of a company's employees are unaware of, or do not understand, its strategy.

The typical planning function facilitates the annual strategic planning process but takes little or no leadership role in seeing that the strategy gets executed.

If you're still doing strategic planning the way you've always done it, PLEASE stop and do it differently!