Acronym

I'm heading to Tokyo for my third time next week. Being one of the mecca's for video games, I have no shortage of excuses to visit (in this case, there is the massive Tokyo Game Show that boasts ~200k attendees, and various other technical conferences I'll be speaking at).

Like many travelers, I'm always compelled to learn (more) about where I'm traveling. Sadly, given busy schedules, this usually means reading the country/city Wikipedia page (which alone is still massively helpful). In the case of Japan, I generally like to consume some of its pop-culture and so have been on a somewhat informal/personal "Japanese immersion program"...

A colleague recommended I watch the documentary on male host-club workers, The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief.

Wow, what a fascinating and disturbing story about the hard drinkin', smokin' and hair-sprayin' young men that entertain women for money. Just from an other-world culture point of view, it is quite a jarring film to watch and does a great job in peeling away the layers of the onion off the "glamorous life" facade.

Anyway, what does this have to do with member associations? Well, there's amazingly a lot of parallels to draw in terms of creating "happiness spaces" and being attuned to customer needs, etc. The central character, being the most successful host in Osaka, states multiple times that it's always/only about the customer, and never about himself - he exists to anticipate and serve their needs.

Portions of the film also made me think back to Douglas Rushkoff's thought leader session at ASAE-07 about associations being the place where members can be geeks about what they love.

In short, we should always be striving to create such great happy spaces for members - perhaps even at the expense of what we may personally prefer...

(FYI, the documentary is freely available via Google Video and runs approx. 75 minutes.)