Nick’s Book Blog

Our conference director gave me a Feng Shui calendar when I first started working here. Here's one from February 24 I thought I could give a try: Enhance your money luck by planting in the SE (wealth) area of your garden or yard, any vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants that you hope to sell or submit to a competition. That area in my yard is really shady, but maybe I can specialize in hostas and grow some award-winners.

Here's a job description I came across when I was doing some research trying to figure out how I can best do my job. I think it came from ASAE, but if you know where it came from, feel free to let me know. Position Description Basic functions: Develops and maintains membership in the association, directs service programs for members and interprets profession- and/or industry-wide marketing information. Job requirements: Experience in the development of direct mail pieces and statistical analysis. Good writing skills, ability to speak in front of groups, ability to develop and maintain budget effectively. Ability to manage people and write departmental policies. Should have strong organizational skills such as planning and forecasting. Knowledge of computer systems management and knowledge of telemarketing techniques useful. Specific Responsibilities: 1. Develops and administers a process for identifying, recruiting and registering potential members. 2. Ensures maintenance of member...

I developed this over the course of some other work I'm doing. I found that I needed to distill the very (overly?) comprehensive documents out there. Of course this is not comprehensive, however, if you use a boilerplate policy, you’ll find yourself bogged in in how long to keep your supply chain FIFO documents. Most small organizations don’t get into this level of complexity. Financial records, 7 years. Pretty much everything related to routine money maintenance is kept for this period. This extends to any kind of contract or lease. If space is scarce, look into scanning your old papers. This will help focus you on what’s important and what’s not. And computer memory is cheaper than real estate! If you have developed charts of accounts or depreciation schedules, you should keep those forever. Ditto for depreciation schedules, bills of sale and end-of-year financial statements. Keep any insurance information or legal information for 7 years. Keep employment applications and post-te...

As Ben mentioned , I've been involved in the ASAE supertrend convo happening in the little online spheriod called Icohere. That's a scary name, isn't it? Be that as it may, the convo, along with what I've got going in the job they actually pay me to work on have got me thinking about how to supercharge the whole membership scenario, and I've been going to school on how to make something happen. So these bits of information come from what I've liberally summarized from an ASAE publication based on a survey done in 1986, called The Decision to Join . Although that's now 20 (!) years ago, I can't imagine the reasons have changed all that much. Most of this stuff seems pretty darn fresh. You know, one thing that I see in reviewing ASAE's print products is that you see a lot of ahistoricity. Like, the problems we face are always the same, like the sky is falling. Yet everyone's still here. I'd like to see some kind of longitudinal study that addre...

This book is a classic econ treatise by John Kenneth Galbraith, who was a presidential advisor to many in the middle of the last century. Although Galbraith is considered a liberal thinker, the book is such an historical artifact that that doesn't show much given the current state of world affairs. Apparently this book gave rise to the term "conventional wisdom." Anyway, I pushed "publish" instead of save, so this got out before I wanted it to. And now, I've lost interest with it. I started to read some meta-commentary, and that only made it worse. I'm not having patience today, so go have a look at it on Amazon and see what you think.

I'm writing an article about organization for ASAE's magazine. One of the resources I looked at that I thought would be of general interest was Georgene Lockwood's Compleat Idiot's Guide to Organizing Your Life. The book goes into lots of detail, from organizing your stuff to balancing your checkbook. It's very general, and I didn't use it much aside from my initial research. However, I want to recap here her "Ten Laws of Stuff": 1. Stuff breeds. The more you have the more you need. 2. The useless stuff crowds out the good stuff. 3. Dust, bugs, rodents and moisture all love stuff. 4. Stuff tends to stay where it lands. 5. Stuff expands to fit the space available. 6. Over time stuff becomes invisible. 7. Stuff costs you money more than once. 8. Stuff has a powerful effect on your state of mind. 9. Stuff takes value only when it is used. 10. Stuff doesn’t make you happy, you do! These I've found to be true, ...

I know Guy Kawasaki is like this instant internet celebrity and like a million people are probably linking him, but I wanted to reference this " Art of Creating Community " post because it's so applicable to what we do in associations. It *is* what we do in associations. In particular this is my job! Assign one person the task of building a community . Sure, many employees would like to build a community, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities? Another way to look at this is, “Who’s going to get fired if she doesn’t build a community?” A community needs a champion—an identifiable hero and inspiration—from within the company to carry the flag for the community. Therefore, hire one less MBA and allocate this headcount to a community champion. This is a twofer: one less MBA and one great community. Does this mean I'm accountable now? ;')

Blogging has been fairly light. I'm quite bogged down in administrivia, so I'm hoping to surface from that one of these days. However, we all know how that goes long term... Anyway, I wanted to sit down and write my notes about a lecture I listened to in my car which is called Leadership and the Problem of Bogus Empowerment . The lecture was from the Chatauqua series, and was by a Richmond University biz professor called Joanne B. Ciulla . She had many good points, and the link above is pretty much the same text as the one I listened to. She was engaging and a good speaker. Regarding the substance of the talk, like I said, there was much I found to agree with. The problem of bogus empowerment pretty much sums it up: you can't claim to empower people and then not do it. A lot of the examples of employer-as-body-snatcher were funny. I think, however, that this is not very forward-looking, and maybe that's just because the material is going on ten years old. But, as a comp...

This article is from the San Jose Mercury News. It talks about the growth of nonprofits over the last decade. While the content is somewhat local in nature, it does bear reading as it's almost certainly representative of the sector in general. This reminds me of the lecture I listened to where Diana Aviv also references new entrepreneurial nonprofit types. Although, as I mentioned before, Carnegie I think was the first to do that, and that's been quite a while.

The second in my series on association publications, this time I'm doing the CIO Executive Council's magazine which is called, appropriately enough, CIO . The article I focused on was a pretty good one that focused on strategic partnerships. Here's a graphic that illustrates the issue. I thought the magazine was very well done and pretty slick. The production quality was seriously like Newsweek . Anyway, the piece featured Campbell Soup's CIO, a woman called Doreen Wright. Here's a case study of the issue from IBM themselves . Anyhow, the article was pretty good--but it made partnering sound pretty scary--at least that was my takeaway. Apparently "strategic partnerships" fail like 50% of the time. Above is a graphic that covers some of the issues one needs to look out for. Not being a member of the Executive Council, I thought the magazine did a good job of covering current issues in the field and talking about big-picture stuff. I'm not sure how I w...

I haven't known quite how to do this for awhile, but here goes. My name is Nick Senzee. I live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, where I've lived for four years. I like it here. I am originally from Kansas City, Missouri . I earned my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in French and Francophone literatures from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Although Utah is in the mountains, I never learned to ski while I was there. I think it was a combination of limited cash flow as well as fear of skiing with my black-diamond friends. Provo was great, but after awhile my wife and I decided it was time for adventure. Since we got our degrees in French, we decided to do something very French and move to the capital to make our fortunes (like so many Balzac heros and heroines before us). I studied French because, well, I speak it pretty good. After my degree was over with, I figured out I wasn't very good at doing postmodern readings of texts I didn't care abou...

My library trip has been postponed due to the snow in our nation's capital. So I've got this book and am raring to go. Chapter 1 is entitled "Space is emptiness." Emptiness is an essential aspect of life. It is the unavoidable opposite of fullness, of busyness, of activity. It is the natural and universally present background to everything we see. How can this principle (or element) apply to the nonprofit, or association environment? Or, to the business environment for that matter? Usually we don't think about our organizations in the context of absense, but rather, of presence. But background is important, whether to design or to organizations. The book goes on to talk about how few people actually "see." We look at things, but we don't see them. I came across this link yesterday that talks about asking questions. I think they'd agree that asking these questions, eliciting unobvious answers, is all about "seeing" clearly. RESOURCE: Int...

Whether the words “mission statement” make you shudder or not, the matter comes down to a simple question. Why should you exist? You as a leader should be able to answer that question and it should provoke more than a grunt in your listener! Here are some sample mission statements, some reasons to exist: We provide support, education and advocacy for people with a rare medical condition. We provide Internet solutions at a low-cost in an effort to help non-profit animal rescue and placement organizations end the plight of homeless animals. We advance the professional interests of Marriage and Family Therapists. A mission statement is something that you can point to at every board meeting and ask yourself, is this what we’re doing? Is this decision going to bring us closer to our mission or further away from it? As a board member, you should evaluate your activities using your mission as a guide. If you have staff, your staff should evaluate each of the organization’s many ...

Here's a post by a firm called Gulo , who're writing about some more technical "blogs may be the silver bullet but how do I actually generate content" type of stuff. I generally think the comments are worthwhile, although, I kind of take exception to the "it's unfair to ask staff to blog," line of thought. Seems to me that it's a matter of creating an open culture where staff would have to see a model, and then be encouraged to try it out. Although I can see that not every staffer would be cut out for blogging, I bet one or two would love it--and it probably wouldn't be the communications person, who is probably sick of having to generate content. Also I agree wholeheartedly with the fact that some members would love to get their views out there, and I don't think you'd have to pay them anything. After all, members volunteer for lots of other jobs without the promise of remuneration. Worth the read. See what you think.

So, as a follow up to yesterday's designy post, I wanted to blog this book. I am not a designer, but I have always been a self-aware consumer of good design. As an organization person now, I have tried to leverage design as best I can in an environment that doesn't always care about it. Currently, I have the luxury of working for an organization where design is bread and butter, so now I can indulge myself a little design wonkery. As I've discovered design has a great deal in common with organizational process, etc., so I've made up my mind to expore this more comprehensively. So, reading this book in function of association management is a good start. First chapter talks about the job of a communicator. I think we can see that that's a useful thing to look at. To design means to plan. The process of design is used to bring order from chaos and randomness. Order is good for readers [ed. members or other stakeholders of your organization], who can more easily make se...

You know, since I work for a design-related association--and I've had these thoughts even before I started working here--that really, organizational design has tons in common with traditional design, i.e. "let's create something cool." Anyway, apparently this idea is becoming more mainstream, which I'm all for. Where do I sign up for the PhD program? j/k I need another degree like I need a hole in the head.

Funny line from an article I found . Read the whole thing.

This is going to be a new series here at Nick's Book Blog. I'm going to do a review of association/trade magazines. How am I going to choose which ones to review, you might ask? Very simple. Whatever trade publication is sitting in the magazine rack at the Golds Gym in Baileys Crossroads is fair game for the blog. There are usually two or three there at any time. Now that we've got that out of the way, today's featured magazine is published by the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association , entitled Club Business for Entrepreneurs which is a supplement to Club Business International , February 2006 issue. In general, the magazine is pretty attractive. Lots of ads, clearly there are quite a few advertisers who are wanting to speak to this market. The ads are mainly for exercise machines, industry-specific software, etc. The lead article is about a woman who overcame some hardships of her own and now owns a health club. It's nice, feel-good stuff, and ...

I missed the memo on this one , but I'm making a note of this report for my own reference. It's a report from Moody's Investors Service --the people who do credit ratings and risk analysis--treating issues of governance in the not-for-profit healthcare sector. Now, this clearly centers around hospitals and the like--obviously a different issue than that which us association people face. Nonetheless, the lessons from this report could be useful to many. In particular, the "core dimensions of governance" are ones which should always be on the front burner, regardless of size of what have you. They are, according to the report: 1. Development of Organization's Mission 2. Selection and Evaluation of Senior Management 3. Board Composition and Performance 4. Understanding and Interpretation of Financial Reporting 5. Use of Performance Metrics Based On External Benchmarks to Regularly Review Institution's Performance 6. Maintaining and Building the Organization...

Via Ben Martin , here's a write-up of Bono's speech to ASAE and the Centre. Blogging has been light lately, not that too many people would notice :) I have been trying to get caught up on some things at home and work. These will be useful for me . Also, I just joined the board as secretary of a group called RescueGroups.org . I went to my first meeting yesterday, and it was a great group of folks doing some cool stuff. I'm very much looking forward to it, and it's just fun meeting new people.

So it's now February but I need to start implementing my ideas better. I have decided that it's an implementation problem. In order to make a change happen, you have to advocate for it. In order to advocate effectively, you need to keep good records and keep track of your ideas. Not big ideas, mind you, the small little innovations that make a tight ship. I need to be better at documenting problems and recommending a coherent solution. All this takes discipline, so I'm going to work on that.