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Like all of the ASAE Annual Meetings I've been to, the 2010 edition was packed with sights and experiences I won't soon forget. The five-year-old kid that plays air guitar during Journey at Dodger Stadium. A grilled macaroni-and-cheese sandwich. Certain colleagues' karaoke performances. But of course, I have some actual significant and important memories that will stick with me for a long time, too. Call them takeaways, call them lessons, call them what you will, below are the three major ways my personal outlook shifted as a direct result of the Annual Meeting.

Just the right amount of anxiety was a key message during Bob Rosen's Thought Leader session. He explained that not enough anxiety makes employees complacent, and too much anxiety paralyzes them with fear, but just the right amount will motivate them to act. In itself, this wasn't groundbreaking (though he did frame it nicely), but his emphasis on the leader's role in managing anxiety was a new perspective for me. Rosen said a leader of any healthy organization must be comfortable with anxiety and that such a capacity enables him or her to lead in two ways:

1. The leader can set an example or show others how to live with anxiety;
2. The leader can work to create anxiety within the organization—just the right amount to drive employees toward success.

[Update: Rosen published a book titled Just Enough Anxiety in 2008. So I guess I'm behind the curve on this one, but that doesn't change how much it I liked hearing it.]

Hyper-focused content. In his session with Sterling Raphael from NFi Studios (sadly under-attended, by the way; you all missed out), Ben Martin, CAE, shared how the Virginia Association of Realtors is using news feeds and shared networks to fill out its web content, allowing it to focus its own content generation more efficiently and effectively. The idea that stuck with me, from Ben: "The bottom line is to be extremely hyper-focused on only the content that you can be the best in the world at."

He said VAR used to produce content on staging homes or building real-estate websites, but now it doesn't. VAR focuses on the Virginia angle and supplements its provisions in other topic areas with feeds from the National Association of Realtors and local associations as well as outside news sources. I'm excited to see an association that is making this sort of content model work. [Update: Ben was kind enough to send along the slides from their presentation. See slides 10-15 for some ideas I particularly liked about content, community, and commerce.]

Social media is just a fact of life now. While there were, by my count, five Learning Labs specifically about social media, I got a general impression that social media is just baked in to all the things associations do now. Not every association is at the same level of expertise, of course, but in several instances I saw social media come up as just one part of a discussion of a bigger topic (communications, fundraising, leadership, etc.) rather than being its own topic.

Perhaps not everyone agrees with my assessment, but it's a thought that's been growing in my mind for a while and was confirmed at the meeting, at least from my vantage point.

For links to thoughts and takeaways from other Annual Meeting attendees, see the various Quick Clicks entries from the past week.