The Association Renewal Blog

Playstation at Work?

A Baby Boomer complaint about younger generations that I have heard is that they are more interested in playing video games than doing work. All those hours playing video games gives them short attention spans.

Tell that to Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at MIT and cofounder of the gaming and learning research initiative, called The Education Arcade.

He was interviewed in Harvard Business Review this month and he had some interesting points to make about how growing up on video games will impact performance at work—but in positive ways. Gamers become good at making rapid decision based on limited information, which seems to be handy in our age of rapid information flow. “They can quickly reroute themselves and change their priorities as new problems arise, which is the style of decision making emerging in the contemporary workplace,” he posits.

This strikes me as an example of pursuing generational renewal as opposed to generational reaction. Simply take what is presented by the new generation and work to discover the strengths, rather than reject what is different simply because it is different.

What is Development?

I read yet another article this morning that was inspired by the passing of Peter Drucker. This one was by Amy Joyce in the Sunday Business section of the Washington Post. In it, she said that Drucker

“believed that every enterprise should be a learning and teaching institution. Drucker told managers and executives that their business was to grow and develop people.” (p. F6)

In corporations this advice has amounted to corporate training programs, but Joyce points out that these programs often provide incomplete development. As one corporate training manager notes, the training often provides skills or knowledge related to the technical performance of a job (a cashier learning to use a cash register), but  not the “soft skills” that “advance the person in a job or help the store gain and retain customers.”

But even this falls short in my opinion. There’s nothing wrong with soft skills, mind you, and I agree that they are too often ignored. If you want bang for your training buck, then definitely invest in providing staff with training on how to communicate, deal with conflict, etc.

Advancing someone in a job or even gaining and retaining members and customers may be laudable goals, but they should not be the ultimate goal here. The goal should be the development and health of the whole system, and even as you train individuals, you must keep that goal in mind and connect the training to the system’s development. It’s not just that the training is focusing on the wrong skills—the problem is that the training is not connected to a series of other activities that work together to improve the health and resilience of the system.

What if you applied this concept to the notion of “leadership development?” What if the goal of your association’s leadership development program was actually to increase leadership capacity of the entire system? Jeff and I are working on some answers to those questions.

The rationale for renewal

In the debate about whether and how associations need to change themselves in the 21st Century, there is a key point of view missing.  Some believe that associations are simply too traditional, conventional and risk averse to do anything but slowly evolve.  Others believe that the association, as a form of organizing for creating and  enabling the creation of value, has atrophied to the point of no return, making nothing short of all-out revolution essential.  The apparent dichotomy between evolution and revolution, however, ignores a more fundamental reality that all leaders must acknowledge:  to succeed going forward, associations must embrace a genuine commitment to their own renewal, including both evolution and revolution.

Next Generation Leadership

I just got the November issue of Associations Now from ASAE and the Center. I was drawn immediately to the tease in the top right corner of the cover that says “Next-generation leadership, 41.” If you know Association Renewal LLC, you’ll know that the tag line on our web site reads “Delivering next generation leadership to associations today.”

When we use the phrase “next generation” we are referring to an entirely new brand of leadership (and possibly a new version of associations as well). The article, it turns out, was referring to human generations, i.e. student members as the next generation of leaders for associations. The article cites examples of associations who are actively bringing student populations into the mainstream of the association.

My favorite quote from the article is from a conversation with Margaret Wheeler, who is the president of the Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development. She makes some important points about how “uncomfortable” association leaders may become by engaging students and younger people in general in a real partnership:

“It’s your members stepping out of their comfort zone,” says Wheeler. “They have learned to behave a certain way in order to get into leadership positions, but they need to embrace what young people bring to the table.” Wheeler boldly suggests that organizations don’t need environmental scans or scenario planning. They’ve got the future right in front of them. (p. 45)

Peter Drucker

Thanks to Kevin Holland and the Association Inc blog for being the first (of many, now) to post something about the passing of Peter Drucker, an eminent source of wisdom on leadership and management.

I will admit that I have NOT read Drucker's nonprofit management book (but it will arrive from Amazon shortly), and I'm interested to see what he has to say about "constant renewal" and "community," which are obviously very important to Jeff and me.

I also liked the story that John Watkins of the Simple Society Alliance for Human Empowerment told on ASAE's Executive Management listserver about his interaction with Drucker and Drucker's opening line to the talk he gave at an association meeting:

I'm not going to tell you anything new tonight, but please, when we're done, go home and do them.

More on being strategically DUMB...

Our friend Ben Martin asked us to elaborate on our "DUMB" concept.  Here are our initial thoughts:

• Decisive—The strategy makes choices about what is most important to the organization with clarity, simplicity and focus.

• Unique—The strategy is distinctive relative to competitors and the marketplace.

• Meaningful—The strategy helps the organization realize the deeply held values inherent in its mission.

• Bold—The strategy challenges the prevailing orthodoxy of the industry.

We are posting these bullets during the lunch period of a client engagement in New Hampshire, so there isn't time to go further right now.  But we will soon, so stay tuned!

Right Words, Wrong Place?

I wrote a post early this morning for the "Get Me Jamie Notter" blog about Jeffrey Pfeffer's column in Business 2.0 magazine that started talking about leaders being able to admit mistakes, but by the time it was over, it was all about the dangers of linking the words "strategic" and "planning."

Obviously, this is a topic I SHOULD have brought up over here on the Association Renewal Blog, so please go take a look!

Read the post here.