Being Something to Everybody

Associations have a soft spot for wanting to make people happy. One of the mistakes we frequently make, since we all have diverse membership bases, is trying to please everyone. Trying to be everything to everyone. This is typically hard to sustain strategically. You...

The Truth About Change

My last two posts about truth have generated some of the best comments this blog has ever seen. I quoted Joe Gerstandt's comment in the second post, and that one generated an equally awesome comment from Lindy Dreyer. Her question was bout leading change when...

A Culture of Truth Starts at the Top (?)

I clearly have some issues with hierarchy, and since I'm all about systems, I often find myself pointing out ways that people who are NOT in official positions of power can work to make things happen, change things, etc. In general, if someone says X needs to come...

Leading Broken Organizations

Bruce Butterfield has created an interesting dialogue over on the ASAE listserve when he compared the association community to the struggling/dying industry of newspapers. Maddie posted about it, as did Peggy. Glen Tecker did a pushback post, arguing that we...

Why Do We Resist Learning?

I am quite proud that my guest post over on the SocialFish blog on whether your organization is human enough for social media got so much traction that it is third(!) on their post ranks. I'd like to unpack the post a bit over here.The first point I want to...

More on Being Human in Organizations

I have written two posts that are explicitly about being human this year. The first was building off Dan Oestreich's blog and the second was building off of Gary Hamel's awesome book, The Future of Management.  In both posts I make a fairly simple...
Jamie Notter