The Association Renewal Blog

Growth Potential

Business 2.0 this month has an article about the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and how a manager has closed profitable lines of business in order to create EVEN MORE profitable businesses. He didn’t look at all the components of the business and try to improve the worst ones. He looked at all the potential and made strategic moves that would best tap into the potential (regardless of whether that component made money or lost money in the last year).

I think this is huge, and Association executives need to hear this message. Just because you’re successful, doesn’t mean you as successful as you could be! Although I respect the notion of measuring what you’ve already done and having that inform your strategic moves, you must be careful not to trap yourself into using that mode only. This manager’s feelings on Six Sigma:

If I listened to Six Sigma, I’d still be sitting here five years later measuring things.

Instead, he has increased the Grand’s revenues to over $1 billion and annual operating profit is up 45%. Not bad for someone who shut down profitable operations.

Generational Regression

The first half of the second day of ASAE & The Center’s Membership and Marketing meeting was about generational differences. The plenary speaker focused on it, as well as the subsequent concurrent sessions.

As popular as generational differences have become in the last year, too much of the conversation remains at the level of stereotypes. As Jeff put it during the session, a little knowledge can be very dangerous. The plenary speaker had accurate information about the differences, but here are some of my more frustrated reactions to what he said.

Generation X are “difficult” people
I thought we were over the Gen X bashing that characterized discussion of this generation in the early days. Maybe it’s because he’s still speaking to primarily Boomer audiences (everyone seems to enjoy putting down the generation after them), but I’m tired of it.

Chauvinism against youth
Which brings me to the next point. Inherent in too many of these conversations is an undercurrent that young people are incompetent and worthy of ridicule. Twice he referred to Millennials as kids (mid twenties) who live at home and have their parents cut their meat. Everyone laughs at this. I think there is a new trend with Millennials living at home longer—but I think this has more to do with the housing boom and economics than it does their inability to use a knife and fork. I do think millennials have been “attended to” as children more than X or Boomers were, but that is no reason to make fun of them. I think we need to actively support each other in stopping this .

The number of years in a generation span is purely random
This speaker had Gen X at 14 years long, and like most before him he provided no justification. I agree this is not an exact science, but if the length of a generation is significantly different than the length of a life stage—about 20 years—then I don’t trust it (unless you provide a rationale for your choice). People seem to choose a cutoff date in order to ensure that their research supports the conclusions they've already drawn about the generation, particularly Generation X.

I know we can do better than this in the ongoing conversation about generations.

Membership and Marketing

I’m attending ASAE & The Center’s Marketing and Membership conference (yesterday and today). I’m particularly looking forward to today’s program, because the focus is on generational differences. This reminds me, however, that I haven’t even blogged on the session I heard last week at the Forum’s annual meeting where Arthur Brooks (author of the Smith Institute report on generations) spoke. I have much to say about that! (And, by the way, I just discovered that Brooks is coming to speak at ASAE in July!)

In the meantime, there are several of us who are blogging from this conference (Jeff, Ben), and I have a couple of tidbits from yesterday’s session:

• One of the people at my table in the morning had 85% of her members in the “Boomer or older” categories.
• Apparently we are exposed to somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 marketing messages a day (no wonder I ignore them!).

The morning keynote was Mark Hughes, who wrote a book called Buzzmarketing: Getting People to Talk about Your Stuff. He gave six “secrets” for getting attention, but my favorite was his first: push buttons. Specifically, people talk about things that are rooted in emotion. Value propositions are great, but if you want people to talk, you need to give them a story, and it has to hit their emotions. My favorite quote from his talk:

If you’re a smart association, you’re enabling discussions.

Implementing

There’s an article in the June issue of Forum magazine about strategic plan implementation, and like much of what I read about strategic planning, it really reconfirms for me how bad strategic planning can be.

The article does provide some logical tips around implementation. Tips like prioritize, put action items on a timeline, designate teams to drive implementation, and periodically evaluate your progress. You can’t go too wrong with these ideas.

But listen to part of the premise for the article:

Many suggestions have been written about how to get a strategic plan off the shelf and into the daily flow of the workplace—distributing the plan to everyone, letting them know that management is behind it, assigning specific people to specific tasks, and so on. Reality strikes when, after a few months no progress has been made because everyone is just too committed with the current workload.

My jaw hit the floor. If the strategic plan creates an unresolved conflict with current workload, then it is useless. A strategic direction, if it represents a shift or a new direction, will certainly require a review of current workload—some things will need to be re-oriented or eliminated. But how is it possible that you are “too busy” to pursue a strategy that you have decided is necessary for your success? That doesn’t make sense.

Which is, of course, why I hate traditional strategic planning. Strategic planning rarely comes up with a clear strategy. It too often comes up with merely a list of new action plans that you then heap on top of your existing ones. Implementation is a very good thing, but resources spent to better implement a (likely) bad strategic plan would be better used towards developing a real strategy to begin with.

Are they playing A Flock of Seagulls?

I don't know about you, but I absolutely love 80s music!  I just can't get enough of it and so I've really noticed recently that it is being played everywhere I go.  When I shop in my local supermarket, I'm singing and dancing down the aisles to Come on Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners or Easy Lover by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins.  (Quite a sight for the other shoppers, I assure you...)  When I drop some clothes off at the cleaners, I'm mouthing the words to Stray Cat Strut, and when I'm sitting in a restaurant having lunch, I'll tap my foot on the floor while Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran plays in the background.  (BTW, all of the song links go to their music videos on YouTube.com)

For me, this is an incredibly exciting cultural shift.  There was a time not that long ago when you couldn't pry an 80s song out a radio station, except perhaps for about 30 minutes on weekday evenings or during the wee hours on weekend nights.  Today, the music of 80s is front and center again because pesky Gen Xers like me have cash to spend and we just love to hear the songs we danced to in high school wearing our Members Only jackets, parachute pants and white Capezios!  (Let me just state for the record that I only wore two of these three items when I was in high school.  I will not elaborate any further at this time.)

So if you're an association leader questioning the deepening reality of generational shift, I suggest you listen closely to the music being played where you shop or eat. If you hear A Flock of Seagulls on the sound system, you can be sure that the world is changing.

Strategic Off-Site

HBR is giving me lots to write about this month. In the article by Frisch and Chandler about “Off-Sties That Work,” they point out early on that

The strategic off-site is the one meeting that the CEO (or the division head) owns completely. No matter who actually runs it, the business leader convenes it, helps design it, and ultimately will be measured by its results.

While obviously written for a corporate audience, this point is critical. Too often, association executives abdicate their responsibility for the strategic off-site. First, this off-site is not for the senior management team, it is for the Board. They “own” the association, right? And the board wanted a facilitator, so the executive hires a strategic planning consultant who takes everyone through a process (the consultant’s process). The executive does not engage in the design of the meeting (and usually doesn’t want to).

No wonder people complain about strategic planning retreats.

The work of strategy is too important to outsource. Yes, there is a role for consulting (I mean, come on! I’m a consultant!). Consultants bring expertise in process design and strategic thinking to the table, but they must employ that expertise in service of building the capacity of the executive. I think too many consultants fail in that regard, but in their defense, it is because many association executives either do not want it, or at least do not ask for it.

Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes

June HBR has a good article about making mistakes. Specifically, Schoemaker and Gunther title the article “The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes.” Yes, mistakes can be a good thing, although most organizational cultures would fundamentally disagree.

Even if you can rationally see that an intentional mistake is really the same thing as an “experiment” (which most people probably think of as good things, in moderation), most organizational cultures will push against this. We have been taught to be efficient and effective. We value quality and we don’t want to see defects. If you do something that does not work (a mistake), it is likely to show up negatively in your performance evaluation. When people make mistakes, it costs the organization money.

That last one is important. The article shows that the costs of mistakes can easily be seen as an investment, rather than merely a cost. A phone company has a statistical model they used to decide which new customers needed to pay a deposit and which didn’t. In order to check if it was right, they tested the assumptions by NOT collecting a deposit from 100,000 of their highest risk customers. This move would cost them millions of dollars. They studied which of those actually did cost them money and revised their model based on the new information. The smarter screening model saved them, on average, $137 million per year.

Mistakes generate learning. Learning generates success and adds money to the bottom line. Over time, more (intentional) mistakes will be better for your association, particularly when they uncover flawed assumptions that drive your current operations. Are you willing to explore those assumptions? Maybe THAT’s a mistake you don’t want to confront?

Thanks to ASAE & The Center!

We want to offer our thanks to ASAE & The Center for mentioning our article on The Long Tail in their most recent newsletter.  The article, Associations in the Age of the Long Tail, appeared in the February 2006 issue of Associations Now.  We think it is quite timely for you to go back and read it, especially with Wired editor Chris Anderson's book on The Long Tail coming out next month.  I've been reading an advance copy of the book and I think it definitely should be included on the must-read list of every association executive interested in new business models for their organizations.   

Just Say No

The back cover of this month’s HBR has a simple, text-only ad for BMW. Nearly half the page simply says:

“No.”

In smaller text, they explain:

The ability to say no to compromise is a rare thing these days. Many companies would like to be able to say it, but so few have the autonomy to actually do it. As an independent company, BMW can say no. No, we will not compromise our ideas. Now, we will not do it the way everyone else does it. Now, we will not factor designs down to the lowest common denominator.

I do not bring this up merely because I love BMWs (and in all honesty, I do love them). I raise it because I think the association community needs to pay more attention to “no.” Associations love “yes.” They want to say yes to their members, yes to their business partners, yes to their vendors. The more people you say yes to, the more people you have as members, suppliers, advertisers, etc. Right?

No.

If you say yes to everything, eventually it will catch up to you. You have a choice. You can say yes to ten things and do each one of them half way, or you can say no to five of them and do the other five completely. Some people will turn away because of your “no” (some people think BMWs have too stiff a ride). They will not be your customers or members. But the ones who live for a stiff ride (makes for better cornering) will become evangelists for you.