Acronym

Yesterday, Kerry Stackpole, CAE, president of Printing & Graphics Association MidAtlantic, helped provide a lense through which association leaders can look at innovation. He's back today with a second post on the importance of an eyes-open approach to innovation.

Let's be honest, you've got plenty on your plate already--maybe it's overflowing. Everyday there are greater demands for your time, association resources, and improved outcomes in all that your organization seeks to achieve on behalf of the membership. That's exactly why you should want innovation at the center of your plate. Really stupid idea, you say? Don't be so sure.

Part of the opportunity that underlies the work of association leaders is the opportunity to extrapolate from history, experience, and current events what the future might hold for our organizations. Ultimately and more importantly of course is applying those hypotheses to your organization by creating a new product or service or establishing an entirely new, more competitive position. In a word, innovating.

In his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs described his life as a college dropout. "Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

"Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do."
With that as backdrop consider one of this country's grand old organizations. The International Typographers Union (ITU) beginnings dated back to the 1850′s. The member's were craftsmen who set wood block and metal type by hand. Publishing in all forms flourished through the growing use of machine type and the launch of photocomposition in the 1960s. While the move to photocomposition was viewed mostly as an evolutionary change, in fact, it was revolutionary.

With a membership of over 121,000 typographers in 1964, the ITU was a powerful part of the labor force. Twenty-two years later they ceased to exist. The age of craft typography had come to an end, thanks in part to Steve Jobs and that accidental calligraphy class. What remained of the ITU was absorbed by the Communication Workers of America Printing, Publishing, and Media Workers Sector led by the man who is now the Public Printer of the United States, William J. Boarman.

It is a cautionary and parallel tale for many associations, professions and industries today. Revolutionary information technology is competing to capture market share from what were once the exclusive domain of associations and organizations in a diverse array of markets.

As leaders we are being challenged everyday by new technologies, content delivery systems, and new business methods that chip away at our organization's core value. While some of the early competition or technology-based efforts have fallen short or failed miserably, there is little reason to take comfort. These are the seeds of the future. So as a leader here's the question you need to consider now: If your association or organization went out of business today, who would miss you and why? It should be a simple question, but given serious consideration it is not so simple. Creating an innovation pathway to deliver the future is about answering this question and others more fully and with fresh zeal. How to get started? You might consider making that trip to an accidental classroom near you.

Tomorrow Jeffrey Cufaude completes this short series on innovation in which he'll take us from defining to doing.