Acronym

Scott, my observation is that for many IMOs, particularly professional societies, it's the volunteers that self-organize into functional specialties that represent their personal interests. Staff then have to follow for support.

Organizations like ASAE publish research and best practices lauding membership as the pinnacle for association good service, urging association professionals to give the members what they want. The same research says that when association leadership wants to do otherwise, and consider enterprise-wide perspectives, the leadership is "out of touch".

Why is anyone surprised about turf battles and "that what is optimal from the perspective of one function will take precedence over what is optimal for the firm as a whole"?

This is exactly why I wrote "Is Membership Dead?"

Food for thought.

While turf battles are a logical outgrowth of the issue Martin talks about in this quote, I don't think they are his precise concern. I believe he is arguing that organizations use functional specialization to manage the complexity of their work, which leads executives and managers to view holistic issues and challenges only through the fairly proscribed lens of their specific functions. The problem this creates is captured in the following quote from Peter Drucker, which Martin includes in the book:

"There are no finance decisions, tax decisions or marketing decisions; only business decisions."

Martin argues that senior leaders need to develop a capacity for integrative thinking, which will enable them to grapple productively with the full complexity of the issues they face. In this sense, it isn't enough for leaders to simply set aside their specialist orientations. They must cultivate a mindset that makes it possible for them to hold potentially conflicting ideas in their heads at the same time, as they seek to synthesize the best elements from each to create novel strategies and solutions.

I agree with Virgil that we do our leaders and our associations a profound disservice when we encourage them to use membership wants as the prime directive for making complex strategic choices on behalf of their organizations. This comparatively narrow point of view undermines integrative thinking, corrupts the integrity of the decision-making process and discourages innovation.

In closing, let me also mention that readers of this post may be interested in listening to my recent podcast interview with Roger Martin about The Opposable Mind. It can be found at http://tinyurl.com/ywkchh

Thank you Jeff for the clarification. I went in wanting to keep the post as short as possible, but I left out an important qualifier -- this is what I thought of while reading the book, not what Martin was explicitly talking about.

Martin almost lost me early in the book when he wrote about the rigorous research including 50 in-depth interviews of leaders -- a style within the leadership book genre that I have grown weary of. But I persisted, and I'm glad I did.

I'm not really buying a lot of the integrative thinking jargon, and I'm definitely unconvinced with his approach at teaching the skill. But the idea of decisions not being constrained to "either/or" is the power of the book and is something leaders should think about.

Thanks to Scott for raising this issue and this good resource.

My point (albeit perhaps inelegantly worded) is that functional specialization is one of the most common organizational strategies used in individual member organizations, becasue that's the inherent method that volunteers use to self-organize their respective common interests. Staff, of course, may contribute to functional specialization, but in my experience, the primary catalyst for the IMO functional specialization is the personal interest of the volunteer.

Given that, turf battles, constituency wrestling matches over resources and siloed organizations are hardly surprising or unexpected.

The test for all of us in association management, in my experience, may be the leadership we contribute to harmonize the various special interests (which will never go away) with the overall best interests of the organization as a whole (which have to be every bit as important as constituency interests).

Coincidentally such leadership is role and (ficuciary) responsibility of enterprise governance. Governance is not made any easier, however, when ASAE & the Center announce that leadership is out of synch with membership, unless of course, functional specialization, turf wars, constituency competition and silos are the preferred organization model.

I don't think that's the preferred model, but I could be wrong. I think we really need to find ways to talk about and model membership and governance in mutually positive and reinforcing ways. If we can, perhaps functional specialization in IMOs will go the way of the dinosaurs! Do you think?