Nick’s Book Blog

I thought this was pretty good, so I thought I'd put it here, until they send me a cease-and-desist :) One of the seven traits of remarkable associations has to do with internal culture in the organization. Remarkable associations feature a close-knit, consistent culture where all employees receive the same information and also see the potential to contribute to a blockbuster production. Everyone, whether in lead or supporting roles, equally shares the responsibility to contribute and add value to the association. Of course, having a healthy organizational culture is something that we often see in theoretical literature, but it can get short shrift or written off in practice. And, it matters to membership professionals what kind of culture is present in the organization. This is demonstrated time and time again in case studies of troubled organizations: what’s happening inside an organization seems to effortlessly telegraph itself to customers, members or other stakeholders, who th...

Here's a couple of things I wanted to write down. 1. This is interesting: a blogger who intends on liveblogging a conference, asks his readers which session he should go to . I don't have time to pre-digest what you could do with this concept, but it's interesting. 2. Really cool 2.0 app, GroupLoop , that is highly relevant to associations. I see that the peeps over at Acronym have noticed this already. 3. Am listening to " Getting to Yes ," the treatise on negotiations. While a lot of it is good information and bears paying attention to, I wish it drilled down in its examples more. It either uses simplistic, made-up scenarios, or it uses huge macro-level geopolitical examples. The subtitle of the book is something like "how to get what you want without giving in." Yet, as I go through the content, it seems like they are indeed advocating giving in a lot more than ideal.

I found this sidebar in Baltimore SmartCEO while waiting in my doctor's office. They apparently reprinted this from Boscobel Marketing Communications. But this looks like a good tipsheet that people could use when these issues come up. However, I think if you're in a small organization, you would certainly want to free yourself from creating the kind of volume this suggests. 1. Discovery. Gather information about the organization and its competitors and analyze target audiences. Use sources such as the organization's executive team, existing collateral/marketing material, websites, media scans, and interviews with industry leaders to develop a clear picture of the marketplace and environment. 2. Criteria. Develop a set of criteria that the name must adhere to using research from the discovery phase. This "name roadmap" will allow the team to evaluate the name on its own merits, and help remove subjectivity from the final decision. 3. Preliminary Name Candidates. H...

I got a flyer in the mail for an upcoming seminar given by WhitefordTaylorPreston and the Reznick Group with the title "How to use your 990 as a marketing tool." Topics include: "Do you know who is looking at your 990 and why?" "How would your 990 look to a first-time reader?" "Who prepares or reviews your 990?" Day two focuses more intensely on issues of executive compensation, compensation of board members, payment to independent contractors, program expenses, lobying activity reporting, relationships with other organizations, and unrelated business income activity. While I these issues generally apply more to charity-ish types of organizations than to professional or trade associations, it does bear thinking about. Your 990s are available to anyone who wants to look at them. What story do they tell?

I got a catalog from Board Source. Their cover book is called "Taming the Troublesome Board Member." Looks worth a looksee. Also in the mail is Cal Clemon's The Perfect Board , which he was nice enough to send me a few weeks ago. A quick skim through shows it to be a worthwhile read, and definitely a good training piece for incoming board members. I'll give it a fuller review later.

This book, by Edward De Bono, is a really good framework for attacking issues. Of course, every one who writes a book wants it to be revolutionary, and to "change the way the world's most successful business leaders think." But today, I'm feeling cynical, and I think that changing the way people think doesn't happen very often. However, this book is useful, and it could be easily tailored to the point of even becoming (wait for it) AN ASSOCIATION HACK. Basically, the point is that you engage different kinds of thinking when you're deliberating. You can be interested in numbers, in feelings, in growth, in creativity, etc. So De Bono lists these attributes and gives them a hat of that color. The hat is symbolic (altho it could be concrete, I suppose), and basically, it allows you to communicate what's going in to the thought processes. It helps the user of the framework to be more explicit, and therefore there's less playing of "guess what I'm t...

So while all my association peeps were in Boston, we worked all weekend on our weekend project, RecipeThing.com , which is in beta (I think!). Lemme know what you think!