The Association Renewal Blog

Choosing What Matters

Associations Now has an article that is an adaptation of a chapter from the Thompson, Emery and Porras book, Success Built to Last (Porras wrote Built to Last with Jim Collins). The article says, in short, that those who have been incredibly successful have persistently stuck with their core values, or what “matters.”

I think this may be one of those “curse of knowledge” moments, because when you sum it up like that, it doesn’t feel that powerful. Successful people do what matters to them? Why is that such a big deal?

The trick, I think, is being clear about what matters. It is very easy to pick a number of things and put them in your “matters” box. Our culture promotes a number of values that everyone can be proud to call their own. And they may be important to you, but that’s not enough. There has to be a piece of the “what matters” that is uniquely yours. Listen to the last few sentences of the article:

The lesson here is that you can’t—or shouldn’t hijack someone else’s value system. To do so would be a violation of integrity to what matters in your life. There is no more personal decision than to discover what meaning means to you. Only you can make that choice.

This is why you can’t build a life around best practices. And you can’t do it with organizations either. I really love the “only you can make that choice” line. Organizations have to make a choice as to what they are really all about and what will really drive their success. Read all you want about best practices or what makes organizations successful, but the point of that exploration should be divergent (expansive learning to generate new insights), not convergent (narrowing options towards a conclusion about what to do). The convergent part must come from within. That’s where you make your choice.

Do Great Ideas Stick?

When I posted last week about Chip and Dan Heath's brief piece in Harvard Business Review, I wasn't aware that I would get a chance to meet them! Okay, one of them, at least. Dan Heath is speaking at ASAE & The Center's Great Ideas conference in January. I have a session at Great Ideas, as does Jeff (actually he has two: an innovation boot camp before the conference, as well as a session during), so we will be there to hear the keynote speech by Dan (and maybe get a book signed).

Translating Strategy

Chip and Dan Heath have a book coming out in January about why some ideas stick and others don’t. They have a brief piece in the “Forethought” section of HBR that talks about it. Specifically, they point out that leaders suffer from what they call the “curse of knowledge.” That is, leaders spend a lot of time and effort developing a strategy for the organization, based on a tremendous amount of knowledge. They then encapsulate their strategy in one or two sentences, which people on the front line hear as too broad or meaningless or corporatespeak. The problem is, those sentences only make sense to the people who have all the knowledge that went into creating them. Without the knowledge, the phrases don’t make as much sense.

But it is VERY difficult for the people with the knowledge to see this. They usually look at the front line people disparagingly. “Why can’t they understand this?!” Really, it seems painfully clear to the leaders. This is the curse of knowledge. The Heaths point to some interesting research to demonstrate their point, and I encourage you to try this out. A researcher asked one person to “tap” (their hand on a desk, for instance) the tune of a simple song that everyone would know (happy birthday was their example), and another person (who was not told which song it was) would have to guess the song. People estimated that the other person would guess correctly 50% of the time, when in reality only about 2.5% of the people guessed right.

If you try this you will understand this curse of knowledge first hand. While you are tapping out the tune, you’re “singing” it in your head. But the other person, without the benefit of your mental singing, just hears boring taps on the desk, and it doesn’t make any sense. It seems so obvious to you and so meaningless to them. Just like those strategy statements.

The Heaths’ antidotes to this curse involve using more concrete language and telling stories. I think it is important to encapsulate those strategies in simple language, and in doing so, you start boiling down concepts to just a few words and that’s where the curse comes in. So you’ll need some translations. Their example was Fedex using a story of a delivery person with a broken down truck that actually convinced a competitor to take him on their truck so he could finish his rounds. This translates that “absolutely positively” must be there overnight concept.

If you have a “strategic plan,” how do you translate it?

Mark Anderson: Beyond the CAE

I’ve never met him, but my network has always said very good things about Mark Anderson, who heads up the American Society for Surgery of the Hand. Forum magazine did a profile of him this month, and here’s my favorite quote from Mark in the Q&A:

The knowledge domains of the CAE are necessary but not sufficient conditions for success in the 21st century. Other important competencies for the 21st century nonprofit exec include improvisational leadership skills, the ability to engage in authentic conversations, understanding board and staff’s unexpressed expectations, and finding new ways of engaging all of an association’s communities.

He says he’s working on a book about those competency areas, so I look forward to reading it.

Continuing to make the case

As Jamie and I continue to make our case against strategic planning, please check out this post I made to the Principled Innovation Blog today.  It is Part II of the three-part series I am writing on that blog about strategy and innovation.  Part I can be found here.  Part III will be up before Christmas.

Gen X: Is there Work in Work/Life Balance?

Peter O’Neill put up an interesting post on the Acronym blog yesterday, making reference to some generational issues. The gist of his post was that although Gen X and Y are talking about wanting more work/life balance, Peter doesn’t see a way around working long hours in order to be successful.

I commented on the post, pointing out that there is a difference between “balance” and “working less.” The quest for balance does not necessarily mean fewer hours, it just means they are more flexibly applied (before carpool, after soccer practice, etc.). I also pointed out that when Gen X and Y started making vocal demands for balance, they were still young, not yet in middle management. At that point in their careers, they are less likely to NEED to work the long hours.

And this is actually the biggest point here. The older members of Generation X now range in age from their late thirties to their mid-forties. Yes, we’re hitting midlife. And crises aside, this is important because this is really the most powerful stage of life. This is where we get responsibility and authority. This is where we get positions of leadership. For a generation that has been in the shadow of the Boomers, it will be interesting to see what happens as we move through the life stage that is, ostensibly, the most powerful.

I think Peter’s observation is getting at this. It’s time to refine, a little, what it is to be Generation X. And I am starting to see more stories, like the story in HBR that Peter was talking about, that are now taking a closer look at what is often defined as “Gen X” issues (like flexible benefits, or work/life balance). I am interested to see if the generational tendencies are now going to show up as “new answers” to traditional workplace issues.