Acronym

In our recent podcast interview, Umair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business (Harvard Business Review Press), told me he makes the following pitch, in the form of a simple question, to boards that need to be persuaded to confront what Umair regards as the "existential threats" facing so many organizations today and going forward:

This question is the perfect way to frame the series of posts about The New Capitalist Manifesto I'll be publishing on Acronym throughout the month of February. In these posts, I will do what I have been doing for the last few years: challenge association leaders to take seriously the idea that their most significant responsibility is building their organizations to thrive over the next decade and beyond.

I'm sure that some association boards and CEOs would prefer to dismiss Umair's question as a rhetorical scare tactic, but what's actually happening in the world around us does not support that view. It's not just about the increasingly rapid flows of learning and knowledge that have overwhelmed the association's traditional information franchise, or the growth of social technologies that have made interaction and collaboration ubiquitous and inexpensive. Today's associations exist as institutions within a broader economic system that is seriously out of balance, something we have all experienced firsthand in the last few years. As a result, our ability to create authentic, meaningful and enduring value--what Umair calls thick value--is compromised. To change the dynamics of this situation and create a different kind of future, incremental change will never be enough. We need truly transformative shifts in both thinking and action.

Association leaders need to get comfortable with this reality very quickly, and engage in the work of transformation as a strategic imperative, not an intellectual exercise. In every organization of every size and scope, we must act to disrupt ourselves without further delay. If we don't, a rapidly failing status quo will continue to wreak havoc with "what we've always done," and cause further damage to our long-term prospects for success. There is no middle ground here. We must be bold, or those willing to be bold will supplant us.

In this post, I have staked out my position. In my upcoming posts, I will develop these themes further and explore ideas from Umair's book that can help individual associations, and the association community as a whole, think differently about what is possible going forward. Of course, this is a conversation, so I hope you will share your thoughts in the comments below. Let's begin the dialogue with Umair's question:

Does your association want to be one of the disruptors, or one of the disrupted?