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We have our entire executive team here at ASAE - Executive Director, Associate Executive Director, CFO, Director of Research and Technology, and the Director of Communication. We made no plans to meet this morning for the General Session, although we usually try to sit together. All five of us actually found each other without using our cell phones - well except for one text! We are so spoiled with iPhones, Blackberries and phones when traveling, that it was kind of amazing that we could find each other without them. I decided that I could do without talking on the phone - no problem. Texts were less expensive and I would just text if it was really necessary. But I do have to admit I only made it until lunch time before I made a couple of calls. Guess I am not quite ready to give up talking on the phone! Of course, we immediately started trying to connect to the Wi-Fi so that we could check our emails. Thank you ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership for having Wi-Fi available to us at the conference. And it is so easy to connect! A special thanks to ASAE for warning us, prior to our travel from Texas to Toronto, to check with our cell phone providers. When I walked into the general session, the first conversations I heard revolved around cell phone use – or non-use as some mentioned. There were many conversations about how to retrieve voicemails! I guess we will all figure it out before Tuesday.

The General Session was wonderful. Gary Hamel made some statements that really made me think. Looking back on my past work experiences, change usually is crisis driven. Don’t we all wish that we could be ahead of the curve so that change was “opportunistic” rather than reacting to some crisis!

Our group got together at the end of the day to share all we had heard today and talk about tomorrow. The five of us were able to cover nine sessions today! We attended sessions on legal issues, social networking, technology, and my personal favorite – “Finding Common Ground in a Shifting Economy: When Membership and CFO’s Unite!” Coming from the school business background, it reminded me of a training program that we do called “Bridging the Gap between Payroll and Human Resources”. I remember going to this session at one of our conferences and our presenters were dressed up as a bride and a groom. They had fun while presenting a difficult topic. I heard some great information and made some contacts to gather additional samples of dashboards and formulas for calculating the value and cost of members. Our association is focused on making data driven decisions and we have developed many dashboards over the last year. We are always looking for additional dashboards to share both internally and with our board and membership. Our team was also interested in the copyright information they heard in the legal sessions, especially when transferring an article from print to website. This is something we will be following up on in the future.

I think we have tomorrow planned. Again we will try to cover as many sessions as possible, talk to exhibitors, and then regroup tomorrow evening and share our sessions. It’s been a long day, but very productive. I just keep thinking it is Monday!