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Sometimes, a conference ends and you've barely scraped up a few nuggets to take home. On occasion, you walk away with a major aha! that delivers such insight that it "pays" for the conference altogether.

Well, bang, right there in my first session, nearly the first slide, I get my aha! from ASAE 2007.

In opening his session on globalization, Richard O’Sullivan emphasized that going global is not about what's best for the association (re: new members, more revenue opportunities, expansion, etc). Rather, it is about what's good for the members. Duh! Of course, it is about the members and what they have to benefit from their association being (more) international, etc. This is so obvious, but it's one of those things that's easy to miss as we are so focused on the operations of the org itself day-to-day. Indeed, it is a subtle shift that allows you to take a totally different perspective on international efforts.

The session also covered how to assess foreign markets in a formal manner, and what aspects could be most interesting to members, etc. The slides are online.

Unfortunately, Richard didn't take the time to get into more of the governance issues and structural models...