Big Risk, Big Reward

This is IT. You’ve just come up with THE game-changing idea for your organization. It’s going to transform membership, and through it, your profession or industry. Upside: potential HUGE reward. Downside: equally HUGE risk. But…

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Reaching Detente With Your Chapters

One of the truisms of association management is that national/chapter relationships are often…fraught. Even though we’re all ostensibly on the same side, it doesn’t always feel that way. Each side feels like the other is…

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The Eternal Butts in Seats Debate

What do you notice – and reward – in your staff? Time at desk? Effort? Results? As you’ll soon discover, I’m pretty clearly in one camp. Some places focus on hours. Were you there at…

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You Say You Want a Revolution

There’s a bit of a fracas currently occurring around the selection of James Carville and Karl Rove as opening keynoters for the 2012 ASAE Annual Meeting. To me, it raises a much larger question: how…

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Super Swap Recap

About two weeks ago, ASAE-GW held the latest Super Swap. This one had a slightly different format: in the morning, we had three short presentations, each of which included some structured activity/discussion time, followed by…

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Examining One’s Habits

Although I celebrate Mardi Gras every year with gusto, I’ve never taken the next step: making a Lenten resolution. No doubt, the fact that I’m not Catholic has something to do with that. But I…

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Who Cares?

The Google+ “+1” button. The Facebook “like” button. “Tweet this.” These are all increasingly common forms of automated sharing. The problem, of course, is that attention STILL doesn’t scale, and, as pointed out in a…

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What Do You Mean You Don’t Want Me?

Last week, the ASAE annual meeting proposal notices came out. Some of us got in, some of us didn’t, and some got a little of both. Now there are half joking – but that also…

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What Is Your Brand?

It’s not your logo or your colors or your font. Those things are your brand IMAGE, but they aren’t your brand. Your brand is an idea…a feeling…an experience. To quote David Ogilvy: brand is “the…

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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

The title of the fourth book in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “So long, and thanks for all the fish” is the message the intellectually-superior-to-humans dolphins leave as they depart Earth just…

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