Jamie Notter Blog
We Like Our Cultures to be Stable
I love to think and write about organizational culture, but every time I dig really deeply into it, I am reminded that the primary source for understanding organizational culture has to be Edgar Schein, His book, the Corporate Culture Survival Guide, should simply be...
Book Review: The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning
I can't believe it took me so long to read this book. It is by Henry Mintzberg, who is a well known business professor and author who teaches at McGill University in Montreal. His Ph.D. is from the business school at MIT, just in case you thought he was just some...
The Fear of Pushing Ourselves
Jim Collins is probably best known for his Good to Great book, but I remember seeing a video of him speaking years ago talking about career development. He drew a classic three-circle venn diagram. Two of the circles were "what you love to do" and "what...
Just What Am I Joining?
I honestly can't remember the last time I saw real anger expressed in a blog dialogue in the association community, but that's what we have right now in the midst of a multi-blog exchange that all started with Joe Flowers' post about why he is not going to...
2010 Year End
In 2010 I continued what I promised to to do in 2009, which is get "out there" more. I spoke at ASAE's Great Ideas and Annual Meeting, as well as local SAEs in California and Texas. I also made presentations at the annual meetings of NASC, ISEA, AMCi,...
The Hard Work of the Middle
We love to focus on the beginning and the end. We like to develop our strategic plans, and we like to have our celebrations or evaluation meetings. But we don't often like what happens in the middle. That's where it isn't working, or it's not done, or...
Your Suck List
I did some work last week with a volunteer group that was half way through it's year of activity. They were at a point where they wanted to look back at how the experience has been going so they could make adjustments for the second half of the year. So at the...
Four Tips for Building Trust
Here's a follow up to my last post (slides from my session on building trust between Boards and members). In the presentation I talked about four ways to build trust. I won't go into all the details, but here's the gist of it. 1. Be consistent. In short,...
Trust as a Secret Weapon
I had a great time on Wednesday speaking to the Virginia Association of Realtors Leadership conference on the topic of building trust between members and the board. One of the first papers I ever had published was on trust (back in 1995), and being from the conflict...