The Association Renewal Blog

Design and Business

If you don’t subscribe to Fast Company magazine, then I suggest you head out to a newsstand and buy the October issue. The theme is design, which is something Jeff and I think about a lot, and there is an outstanding article by Roger Martin that (finally!) shows in a clear way how the spirit of design can be integrated into the spirit of everyday business. It is a very powerful article.

Really. Go out there and read the article. If you are a subscriber, you can read it online.

I’ll post about it later.

We need a new conversation about strategy

In the last month or so, Jamie has put up three posts that I believe are very important in advancing our thinking about the future of association strategy.  I wanted share a few ideas of my own on this topic and see if we can really begin to drive a fundamentally new conversation about strategy in the association world.

A Small Request

At this point, we assume that most of our "loyal" readers have now read our book: We Have Always Done It That Way. We have been very pleased with the feedback we have been getting, and were also happy to see someone actually rate the book and write a brief review on Lulu.com, the publisher's website.

We would love to get some more of those reviews and ratings. If you have read the book (and like it), then we would be grateful if you would go to the Lulu site and post a review. It doesn't have to be lengthy or even terribly well written! Just talk about what you liked about the book. To post a review, you have to sign up with Lulu, but don't worry, that's painless. Name and email address is all they need. Go to the book's site (here) and click on the "log in or sign up to rate this item" link.

We appreciate your support.

A Love/Hate Relationship with 7 Measures

Thanks to Scott Briscoe on the Acronym Blog for posting about the 7 Measures of Success book. I’ve been wanting to post for a few weeks now, but I wasn’t sure how to really frame my post about the report. Scott did that for me:

I love it and I hate it.

I agree with Scott that leaders in the association community should read the report. I also agree there is some very valuable information in there (I, too, favored the excerpted part about adaptability).

But overall, I have to say, I was expecting more. Maybe it was the hype. I really was “anticipating” the release of this report in Boston. I was expecting to see something…not necessarily “new” (there is nothing new under the sun, I realize that), but at least something inspiring. Something with power. Something that inspires me to new behavior or to go in new directions. Good to Great did that for me. It got me excited because it pointed to things that we did not know, necessarily, that high performing companies had in common. It got me thinking about organizations I had worked for, or clients I was working with—thinking about how I could apply the concepts. I think Good to Great gives leaders new tools or new lenses they can use to get more out of their organizations.

I don’t feel like I can say the same about the 7 Measures report. The tools are a bit too blunt, or we knew about them already. Scott’s example is good one: remarkable associations use research; the others use chance. That doesn’t help me. Wasn’t there anything in there about how to analyze research, or how to incorporate research into decision making? I’ve seen associations drown in data, so how did the great ones prevent that? What was the balance between quantitative and qualitative? And Scott’s point about strengthening intuition is great. I would have liked to have seen that discussed.

Similarly, the emphasis on customer service strikes me as not a sharp enough measure. Particularly when customer service seems to be defined only in terms of being member focused. I’m all for being member focused, but members are not your only customers. Members are never your only customers. And what do you look for in your organization with this measure. People who pay attention to members/customers? That’s not enough.

As I said, I wanted more. Am I being too harsh?

Ten Percent of Your World is Strategic?

The latest release in the strategic planning debate comes from Jim Dalton in the recent Journal of Association Leadership. He takes the “mostly dead” position in this debate, by at least declaring that the three-ring binder strategic plan is dead. Like everyone these days, he says the “new” strategic planning must involve others more and be more flexible.

The point that caught my attention, however, was his notion that organizations should spend 80 to 90 percent of their resources on their current programs, and 10 to 20 percent on strategic initiatives. Within your “core” programs, you tweak and adjust, but you use only at most 20% of your resources to make bold strategic moves and deal with “strategic issues.”

This represents the inherent conservatism in the association community that bugs me. Don’t get me wrong—if your 90% core programs are catapulting you strategically into unparalleled success, then by all means don’t stop them and do something new.

But it seems to me that strategy, by definition, is about making choices about where to put your time, attention, and money, so why not have 100% available for those choices? I remember reading in Good to Great how Kimberly Clark, once a paper company that has now moved into paper-based consumer products (like diapers), actually sold the paper mills in KIMBERLY, Wisconsin. Talk about getting rid of your core! But they knew they couldn’t beat Scott in the paper making business, so they got rid of it, and focused on the consumer products.

That is a bold strategic move (that paid off), and I don’t think associations should be deprived of that capability simply because they have always done conferences and continuing education. Strategy is about figuring out what is required for success, and there is no percentage rule that can be applied to that.

No Benchmarking in Blue Oceans

Susan Sarfati’s column in this month’s Associations Now is all about Blue Ocean Strategy, an excellent book by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Jeff and I have been using the concepts in this book during our strategy work with associations frequently over the last year. I echo Susan’s recommendation. It’s a great book.

One key lesson she drew from the book was about benchmarking: “The more you benchmark your competitors, the more you tend to be like them.” The benchmarking draws you towards certain behavior and results, when sometimes you need not be limited by what similar organizations are doing.

This gets at a response I have been meaning to post to Ben Martin’s recent post about the topic. He saw someone post on the membership listerver about NOT benchmarking membership satisfaction stats. Ben thought this was a mistake:

How do you know how well you're really doing unless you look at your stature and performance relative to others? Blissfully ignoring how you stack up relative to other associations is akin to burying your head in the sand like an ostrich.

I’m not convinced.

Certainly I am open to receiving as much information about the rest of the world as you can—ignoring things out of fear is bad. Ben cited the example of salaries, claiming it would be absurd to not know how your salaries stack up to other associations.

But I don’t think this actually is the case. In Boston I heard Fred Reichheld speak (and I’ve read his books on loyalty). He talks about Chick Fil-A, and how they pay their store managers something like $175,000 per year. The top earners earn $250,000 to $400,000. Do you think they benchmark? I doubt it. But their growth is impressive. They don’t blindly pay that much—I assume incredible analysis goes into it. My sense is it is, in fact, one of the reasons they are successful. But, frankly, what other fast food chains are paying store managers is simply not part of the equation.

So be careful with benchmarking. There certainly is room for focused research on the operating environment (which can include research about what other organizations are doing), but the underlying thinking of benchmarking can be seriously limiting.

Getting Above the Noise

Jeff pointed me to a new blog by a guy named Steve Borsch, called Connect the Dots. He used to work at a software company and started a blog and a podcast in order to fully immerse himself in Web 2.0.

I’ve only just started reading his stuff, so I don’t yet have a great feel for him, but I have to say, he wrote a post the other day that I think is exceptionally good.

The opening concept is about signal versus noise (not the blog, but the engineering concept). Short version: lots of signals going to the same location end up creating a lot of noise. As a business owner, I know what he means. I assume association executives see the point as well. Your members are getting a ton of “signals” aimed at them promising value. How do you make yours stand out above the noise?

Here’s the first quote to point out:

DON'T DO THE SAME THING AS OTHERS IN YOUR INDUSTRY SINCE IT CREATES MORE NOISE AND NO ONE WILL CARE WHAT YOU'RE DOING ANYWAY.

Steve put that in all caps. He followed it up with reference to Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote about skating to where the puck will be (as opposed to where it is).

This is such a key strategic concept that Jeff and I are trying to reinforce. You don’t have to predict the future, but building a strategy based primarily on what is working for you today is going to put you further and further behind as time goes on. Figure out where you are going based on what will drive success in the future, and you’ll generate a signal that stands apart from the noise.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole post, but I will give you the last few lines, because they reinforce the important points:

The net-net is that what worked yesterday isn't necessarily going to work today so even I have to stay aware and keep feeding my brain with input. You'll have to use what's worked before as ways to inform what you do...but you'll have to figure out where YOUR puck is going to be and skate toward it as fast as possible.