Bill Taylor, co-author of Mavericks at Work, sat down with me for an interview to discuss the book, how association leaders can challenge their boards to challenge industry orthodoxy and what association mavericks need to know to succeed. (It is a little more than 10 minutes in length.)
MP3 File
Reflecting on the fly feels like a bit of a contradiction in terms, but I wanted to share some initial impressions of how the Collins and Taylor general sessions stack up for me.
My first observation is that I don't think the two sessions were as different as we might think. Following yesterday's session, some people who know me well thought I might be upset by Jim's apparent "dissing" of innovation. I am well aware of Jim's concerns about the pursuit of innovation, and on some level, I share them. The mindless and undisciplined pursuit of innovation is not a strategy for long-term success. But all organizations, including associations, can create enduring success if they make innovation a genuine and consistent strategic priority. Contrary to popular belief, Jim's long view of moving from good to great is not at all incompatible with the work of innovation.
A second thought comes from the focus in today's general session on what I would broadly characterize as the creative and emotional side of the organization. Bill Taylor, Arkadi Kuhlmann from ING DIRECT and Lyn Thomas from Cirque du Soleil all spoke to this issue in their remarks. I doubt, however, that these leaders are any less committed to using data effectively to support intelligent decision-making. At the same time, they recognize that the human imagination and spirit are also critical elements of organizational success. The notion of "data-driven strategies," one of the seven measures of success and an area of emphasis of Jim's talk yesterday, strike me as unnecessarily one dimensional. In voluntary organizations, the energetic and passionate engagement of all stakeholders is an essential ingredient of strategic advancement, and I'm personally struggling with the notion that an Excel spreadsheet is always the best spark for the creativity our organizations very much need to thrive.
One final thought is simply that all association leaders must entertain a simple notion: there is no one "right" way to make sense of or drive toward organizational success. The ideas contained in the 7 Measures of Success book are now a part of our conversation flow and we will talk about them. I am a passionate advocate for innovation and while I know that all associations can benefit from actively engaging in the work of innovation, I recognize that not all leaders in our community will agree. One characteristic of real leadership is being able to live with the tension of competing ideas, and that is precisely what ASAE & The Center are challenging us to do.
Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work, is speaking right now, and he has raised three fundamental questions for all association leaders to consider in the areas of strategy, innovation and the human side of the organization:
+What ideas do you stand for?--It isn't enough to have great products and services. Maverick organizations are fighting for important ideas that will change their industries.
+How will you surface great ideas no matter where they are?--Most of the world's brilliant people will never work for your organization. But they doesn't mean they can't work with you.
+Why would great people want to work for you?--Paying more money is not a strategy for attracting great people. Maverick organizations treat the people side of the organization with the same discipline as other functions.
As an association leader, how will you and your organization answer these questions?
The roar you heard a few minutes ago was the ovation for Anthony Bourdain, a thoroughly enjoyable keynoter, if a little unusual for this sort of meeting. He had us all in hysterics and managed to make a few salient points, as well (Amy Smith summarized them nicely). At the end he took a number of questions from the audience -- in fact, it may be the first time I've been in a session like this where the audience loudly said "awwww" when someone indicated the questions were coming to an end.
The questions covered a wide range, from the Lebanon story Amy described, to an audience member's question as to what Bourdain has against vegetarians ("I like vegetables," he said, "especially when they're cooked in duck fat"), to immigration reform ("I think we need to be honest," Bourdain said, "we're talking about between 17 and 70 percent of the restaurant and hospitality workforce, depending on what region of the country we're talking about. Amnesty, at least. Or we don't eat.").
A couple of the points he made in reference to leadership lessons from the kitchen:
Bad decisions are better than no decisions. A chef needs to be decisive because in the high-pressure world of the kitchen, there is no time to dither. Better to make a decision and stick to it. If it's wrong, you can analyze it later. This ties into a lot of research lately that shows that being decisive -- being able to see a path, make a decision, and stick to it -- can actually be more valuable to an organization's performance than whether or not the decision was objectively "the right one" to make.
To inspire loyalty, the team members have to see the leader work hard. Nobody wants to be led by a dilettante who wanders in and out of the workplace. Bourdain had to make the tough decision to give up his chef position to handle his new media duties, because he didn't be one of those chefs who sort of shows up once in a while -- refusing to give up the chef title but not really doing any of the work. Team members want to know that they're being asked to work hard by someone who's working even harder.
And finally during the q&a session, Bourdain made clear his opinions on his former employer, the Food Network, and their current uber-star Rachael Ray. "$40 a day," he snorted. "Tip, already!"
Fellow blogger, Kevin Holland, is in this overly small room - somewhere. I'm blogging from the floor of a room that filled up 10 minutes before Bourdain started. Fabulous session! Fabulous and entertaining speaker. Clear cut, dynamic, fun, and with clear expectations of his kitchen staff, Bourdain's decisive nature provides his staff with the old fashioned "tough love" approach to management. How refreshing!
As a leader of an organization--
1. Be clear. Set clear expectations of your staff. Do not waiver on those expectations.
2. Be fair. Apply the expectations to EVERY member of your staff even handedly.
3. Have down time with staff. Building relationships outside of the office
4. Set unwaiverable standards. Set very high standards and never waiver from them.
5. Be prepared to break all rules that you set. Always give yourself the ability to change the rules, break the rules, etc.
On a somber note - Bourdain answered questions about his recent taping of his show in Beiruit. The short version is that he and the crew started taping a show. 7-8 days into taping they watched the bombing of the city and were evacuated on a Marine transport. The show will air tomorrow night and will show the crew's experiences.
What an amazing speaker! Kudos for using a non-traditional speaker for this conference!
More from Jim:
+There are no shortcuts to greatness...it is built day by day, year by year, decade by decade.
+Associations face a profound challenge in "getting the right people in the right seats on the bus." How do you make sure that your key seats (staff, volunteers and board) are filled with the right people?
+The leadership difference in great companies is not the presence of leadership itself, but the kind of leadership demonstrated. (Level 5 Leaders)
+In associations, there may be a "legislative" type of leadership, i.e., not executive leadership, but bridging different views to come up with the right decision, although not necessarily the consensus decision.
+The question of staff-driven or member-driven associations is the wrong question. Associations should be data-driven, intelligence-driven and acting on that data.
+Ask your staff or board, "What do we mean by great results?"
+Your most powerful motivational tool might be an Excel spreadsheet. (Personally, I find that pretty hard to believe. ;>)
+The move from great to good occurs when you refuse to accept the brutal facts and refuse to engage in dialogue and debate about them.
+The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change, but chronic inconsistency, i.e., preserve the core while stimulating progress.
+It is not just being a change agent that makes you great. You must also be a continuity agent.
+How many of you have a to do list? How many of you have a stop doing list?
+The importance of "disciplined people engaging in disciplined thought and taking disciplined action."
That’s the number of magazine titles published per year in the United States. More than double the number not so very long ago. It’s no wonder I have a 2-foot-high “to read” pile of magazines sitting in a corner of my office. Seems like every time I get a new magazine, as much as I want to read it, it goes into the “to read” pile. Ya know what? That darn pile is getting to the point of intimidation (visions of malevolent magazines dancing around my desk singing “read me!” “no, read me!” come to mind).
That’s one of the reasons I attended Abby Marks-Beale’s Saturday afternoon session “Conquering Information Overload: How Not to be Pushed by Paper and E-mail.” Among the many helpful tidbits she shared was this four-step process for developing a “quality pile” of publications (according to Abby, this works for e-newsletters, too):
1. Inventory: look at the pile to determine what you have, including how many issues of each magazine are in the pile.
2. Value: rank each magazine on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “I don’t know why I bother to read this,” and 10 being “this is the best thing ever; I get a lot from it.”
3. Triage: put all the publications rating from 1-5 in one pile, those rating 6-10 in a second pile. Toss out everything in the 1-5 pile. Do this step again if you need to, until you have a (smaller) pile of what you consider helpful, quality publications that you want to read.
4. Time: determine how much time you have to read. If you can’t read all the magazines in your quality pile in that time, either toss more of them or increase your reading time.
One thing I liked about this session is that while Abby focused on a variety of tips for coping with the ubiquitous information overload, she also reminded us we’re all human. It helps to rememember, she says:
* You have speed limits (humans don’t work at the speed technology is capable of. Really.)
* You have a forgetful memory (short-term memory can only hold 7-9 pieces of information at any one time; that 10th one means you’re gonna forget something).
* You probably have too-high expectations (know your limits and negotiate with yourself or your boss what can be delayed or delegated).
* You have a need to know (let go of needing to know everything).
* You already know a lot! (probably more than you realize)
* You have a need to breathe (in a stressful day, take a few minutes to pay attention to your breathing as you close your eyes and breathe deeply from your diaphragm).
That last may seem touchy-feely to some, but in the middle of a hectic day it really can help you concentrate, and focus on what’s truly important.
18,821. That's a lot of magazines.
Oh, and by the way, there are 175,000 new book titles (the amount in an average Barnes & Noble retail outlet) published every year.
No wonder there’s so much to read, so little time.
In a comment to my post about Saturday sessions, Zachary Wilson, who I guess will be attending his first annual meeting this year, asked what the “can’t miss” sessions would be. Ultimately, that’s a pretty subjective question, and there’s SO much content at this meeting that there are probably sessions you shouldn’t miss but you will, because you’re at other great sessions. That being said, here’s a high-level response, and I invite the other Boston bloggers to share perspectives.
First of all, be aware that the plenary sessions are always giving you the cream of the crop in terms of speakers. We’ve got Jim Collins, for goodness sake, and he’s talking about a project done specifically for associations. I think that’s pretty special. Goodwin and Taylor are also best-selling authors. I usually find myself feeling quite fortunate to hear the general sessions.
The other big point to make is that after the general sessions, there are still the thought leader super sessions. These speakers are also very high-caliber, national-level speakers—and you have many to choose from! Again, I think at this conference the “problem” will be too many good choices. As an example, I’ve read the books by Carroll and Reichheld (and commented a bit about them on this blog), but they are both speaking at the same time!
And then you have all the concurrent sessions. Here the content really drives my choices. Of course, there are nearly 30 sessions in each time slot, so it will take some studying to figure out which ones to choose. It definitely helps to have a plan.
Next up on my pre-conference reading list is Fred Reichheld’s The Ultimate Question. I like Reichheld’s work, and I’m particularly a fan of his earlier book, The Loyalty Effect. He’s done a lot of research showing just how powerful the difference is between a loyal customer and a fickle one. In association terms, we fight hard to boost membership, but sometimes we end up with too many of the “wrong” members who don’t produce long-term value. A truly loyal member gives much more than just the current-year dues payment, so anything we can do to figure out how to attract more loyal members will benefit us.
One thing loyal members do is refer us to their friends, and that is the focus of his current book. According to Reichheld’s research, if you want a metric that is going to predict the growth of your company, you simply have to measure the answer to one question: would you recommend us to a friend? Put this on a ten-point scale and your 8-10s are your strong promoters, in the middle are some “passives,” and then at the bottom are your detractors (and let’s be honest: we all have people/customers/members who, when asked, would actually say a few negative things about their experience with us).
Reichheld suggests that if you subtract the percentage of your members who are detractors from the percentage who are your promoters, you get your “net promoter score” (he’s a consultant, so he converted it to an acronym: NPS). Notice that the passives don’t really play a part in the score. If half of your membership is passive, 30% are active promoters and 20% are active detractors, your NPS is only 10%. USAA Life Insurance company is a “star,” according to Reichheld, at 82%. But don’t feel bad: Southwest Airlines is a “star” at only 51%. Remember, your NPS can easily be negative (like many of the other airlines!). He has some impressive statistics that show correlation between net promoter scores and company growth in a variety of industries.
I’ll post more as I get through more of the book, but I like the notion that dissatisfied members are just as powerful as satisfied ones. More specifically, dissatisfied customers are actually more powerful than neutral ones. We may look at revenue targets and membership numbers, but do we know what parts of our experience are creating “detractors?” I’m very curious to hear how Reichheld applies his work to associations.
I’m excited to see that one of my favorite speakers – to listen to and to work with – is doing a Thought Leader Super Session in Boston. Don Blohowiak, executive director and founder of the Lead Well Institute, is speaking on Monday afternoon, 3:00-4:00p, in a session titled The Choices We Make: Doing Business Ethically with Integrity. Don focuses on a systems approach to leadership performance and productivity in organizations, and has written six great management books.
The premise of his Boston session is that ethics and integrity aren’t reserved only for the big issues of the day…they also apply to every-day decisions, no matter how small. With the myriad decisions we all make, personal and professional, sooner or later we come across matters for which there is no clear path. Of course, we all hope to act with integrity, and I’m betting Don will be able to give us some tips for ensuring that we do even in the greyest of situations.
It’s been a few years since I last worked with Don, however I remember him as being a pleasure to work with, and very well received by the trade association audience to which I hired him to speak. I’m very much looking forward to hearing him in Boston, and hopefully will get the chance to say hello.
I’ve read the next book from the speakers that Mickie posted. Good news: it was the shortest book out there—took me maybe an hour to read. It’s called Rules of the Red Rubber Ball: Find and Sustain Your Life’s Work, by Kevin Carroll.
It’s an inspirational book about following your passion. We hear this message all the time, and people generally react to it with a nice warm, fuzzy, feeling, but how many of us really go there? When I read the book, I wasn’t really in the mood to be inspired, but it still managed to get me going a bit.
And although Kevin’s session (according to the title) is about play and bringing fun into your work and life, I particularly liked that in the book he acknowledges how much hard work it is to follow your passion:
Pursuing your life’s work requires work. The hard work, the lonely work, is not always enjoyable, but as long as you do it in the name of your red rubber ball [his symbol for your life’s work, or your passion], you will shine.
I don't mean to focus only on Claire Raines as a speaker (I bought some of the books you listed, Mickie), but the generations issue has become very hot in the association world. The Association Forum in Chicago recently used Arthur Brooks, author of the Smith Institute report on Generations, as a keynote speaker at their annual meeting, and half of one day at ASAE & The Center's sold-out Membership and Marketing symposium covered the generations topic.
Interesting point from Brooks' presentation: Generation X and Millennials tend to blur the distinction between "life" and "work," so they are demanding workplaces where they get along well with others and are happy. If they don't get that, they go find another job (and turnover is expensive).
And from the Membership and Marketing sessions: first, there is a tendency in these discussions to make fun of generations younger than you. While we get some funny lines from that, I don't think it's productive. Second, let the younger generations create their own structures for involvement and activity in your organization (instead of you trying to figure it all out for them).
Last week I ducked out of a storm into a Barnes & Noble here in DC and spent an hour browsing. One book caught my eye on one of the tables and I wound up buying it (though, between my Zooba membership and my acute Amazon addiction it seems I always have more books waiting to be read than I will ever have time to finish). This one was rather entertaining, though, and I finished it in a couple of metro trips.
The book was Kitchen Confidential, and I honestly had no idea until five minutes ago, when I decided I should probably check out the thought leader session lineup at this year's annual meeting, that the book's author, Anthony Bourdain, is speaking at one of them.
This is one I'm not going to miss, as I can't wait to hear more about the management philosophy of the man who wrote:
"I've coddled plenty of dangerously unstable characters over the years; I've kept on plenty of people who I knew in the end would make me look bad and become more trouble than they were worth ... I appreciate people who show up every day and do the best they can, in spite of borderline personalities, substance abuse problems, and antisocial tendencies; and I am often inclined to give them every opportunity to change their trajectories, to help them to arrive at a different outcome than the predictable one when they begin visibly to unravel. But once gone -- quit, fired, or dead -- I move on to the next problem. There always is one."
And also wrote:
"I like to tell selected people things in supposed confidence a few times a week, for fun. Later, when it comes back to me it provides an interesting roadmap of data transfer, a barium meal, revealing who squeals and to whom. There are a number of interesting variations on this practice -- feeding false information to a known loudhmouth, for instance, with a particular target in mind."
This should be a fun one, though I suspect Bourdain may give Jamie Notter apoplexy.
Here’s the first tidbit from Claire Raines’ book, Generations At Work. If you like bulleted lists, she’s got plenty in the book. My favorite series is the “Assets and Liabilities” of each generation at work. I think it’s nice because it presents a more balanced picture (we all have pros and cons) rather than a “concern” about particular generations in the workforce.
I looked across the lists to see if there were any commonalities. I only found one, listed in the “liabilities” of each generation:
Veterans: uncomfortable with conflict
Boomers: uncomfortable with conflict
Gen Xers: poor people skills
Nexters: inexperience, particularly with handling difficult people issues.
So if you’re ever concerned about generational differences, remember: we all have something in common—we can’t get along with each other!
Okay, Jamie promised to read up and push the conversations before we all get to Boston. So, here's the reading list (of the general and thought leader session speakers in no particular order) if you want to be the most well-read attendee at the conference.
Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace
The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
Rules of the Red Rubber Ball
And, a couple you'll just have to wait for:
Gently Down the Stream: 4 Unforgettable Keys to Success (Being released in September.)
7 Measures of Success that Remarkable Associations Do that Other Don't (I'm assuming ASAE will be selling this at the meeting? If so, get to the bookstore fast.
I have to admit that I've only read one of these so I better get busy! Anybody, what speaker books did I miss?
Gail Sheehy is most well known for Passages, but I am not adding her latest here. It just doesn't fit in this reading list. Okay, here's the Amazon link because I know you now want to know. I trust Jamie's not going to lead a discussion on this one...
Welcome to the BostonBlog. Sometimes it's nice to know a little bit about the conference speakers to help decide which sessions to attend. Here's the first of many posts highlighting conference speakers -- in this case, Claire Rains, who'll be presenting on Monday from 3-4 on generations and diversity, how to design offerings that appeal to each generation; talk to members about subjects that connect to their value systems; target generations in your marketing; and retain today’s members.
Here's what this author of Generations at Work and the The Art of Connecting has to say about diversity:
"When it comes to diversity, our nation and most of its businesses have historically operated on the melting pot theory. It was great for forming a country, but it’s time for a new metaphor. After all, when you melt everything down, it gets mixed together and it into a mass of gray sludge. The different groups lose their uniqueness. Everything becomes uniform and we lose that variety of perspectives. Potential goes untapped.
I think it works better to think of corporate diversity as a stir-fry where the cook adds a variety of things—genders, generations, ethnicities. Each retains its uniqueness and contributes flavor to the whole dish. Something wonderful is created that is far tastier, more nutritious, and more interesting than any one part. To lose even one ingredient would diminish the texture and taste."
Diversity & Generations, by Claire Raines, 2002
With all these food metaphors, I'm getting hungry and so I'm off to lunch! Find out more about Claire at her website. Several of her books are available on Amazon.