…. Ha. This includes all the associations we’re working with (and those we aren’t) who are working on their Social CRM.  So there!!

(Source)

“Companies that are afraid to commit to goals that lie outside the range of planning,” Gary Hamel and C.K Prahalad conclude in their booklet, Strategic Intent,“are unlikely to become global leaders.”  The authors argue that strategic planning fetters companies to the present and filters their views of possibility through the limiting lens of their current assumptions and limitations. Their alternative to strategic planning is Strategic Intent: harnessing resources and human motivation to an all-consuming, shared ambition, such as beating competitors or innovating far beyond their current level. Companies that became global leaders “created an obsession with winning at all levels of the organization and then sustained that obsession for 10-20 years quest for global leadership.”

So why don’t associations become global leaders?  Most have embraced wildly ambitious missions for transforming industries and professions, becoming the world’s foremost resource on something, alleviating pain and suffering etc.  In re-reading their definitions, it seems unlikely that Hamel and Prahalad would consider such statements as equivalent to “strategic intent.” This is how they further clarify what they mean by strategic intent:

Strategic intent is more than unfettered ambition. The concept also encompasses an active management process that includes; focusing the organization on the essence of winning; motivating people by communicating the value of the target; leaving room for individual and team contributions; sustaining enthusiasm by providing new operational definitions as circumstances change; and guide resource allocation.

In other words, strategic intent implies a network of reciprocal relationships and actions beyond statements.  For one thing, strategic intent has to drive the organization’s priorities, incentives and rewards, resource allocations and criteria for success.  For another, strategic intent must be motivating to all stakeholders.  What many leaders and management theorists do not seem to realize is that a worthy goal or intent does not automatically translate into motivation for others.  The fundamentally flawed assumption that hinders any significant change is that mere articulation of a problem or goal will, in itself, catalyze the right action.

As world renowned leader Michael Maccoby says in his book:  Why Work: Motivating the New Workforce

“Directing human motivation requires understanding values and needs and creating opportunities to express, satisfy and develop them.”

Maccoby is one of the few thought leaders—the only one I know, in fact, other than Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter, co-authors of Humanize—who looks at organizations in terms of people rather than strategy, process or products.  He believes that unlike the industrial era, organizations in the knowledge service era require people who are “motivated, enabled, and empowered to achieve results by exercising judgment.”  Effective leaders in this era are not those who stand apart because of their expertise, efficiency or degree of control but by their ability to create and lead a motivating organization.   The managers who lead organizations, Maccoby believes, should be evaluated by their ability to “motivate employees to take responsibility for: solving problems, responding to customer needs, cooperating with team members, and continuously improving products and services…”

Maccoby describes what he calls the “Four R’s of Motivation;” the levers of engagement that must be activated to energize an organization behind a strategic intent and convert employees from performers of tasks to active partners in innovation and success.  The four R’s are:

•  Responsibilities:  descriptions of tasks is only one aspect of assigning responsibilities; the other component is matching responsibilities with talents and providing opportunities for developing skills and competencies that increase one’s success in fulfilling responsibilities. Enabling staff to bring out their best potential in the performance of their jobs is the source of empowerment.
• Relationships: in creating a motivating and empowering work environment and culture, organizations must go beyond considerations of efficient processes to consider the importance of relationships in human motivation. Interactive, relationship-centered organizations are more motivating than mechanistic, process and task-driven work environments.
• Rewards that are meaningful to specific individuals’ criteria for value rather than generic; reinforce the behavior that produces value added for customers and are fair
• Reasons for a performing a task or modeling behavior that employees understand and embrace, and that resonate with their values and motivations.

Maccoby’s research illustrates that the more motivating an organization is the greater its ability to compete in the knowledge service age. In a similar vein, we are finding in our research that there is a definite relationship between an organization’s orientation (inward or outward) and degree of staff empowerment on one hand, and its capacity to adapt to and resonate with today’s fluid markets on the other.  I copy below an index of some of our research findings, comparing practices and norms driving the management of people between two categories of organizations.  Where do you think your organization fits in these patterns?

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This short and sweet B2B case study discussed by Sandy Carter of IBM shows us some numbers on how Premier, an alliance of 2500 community hospitals, leverages their online community. Awesome.

Need your feedback please!

Does your organization rely on e-learning to drive revenue or member retention? Are you managing multiple e-learning platforms and software to deliver webinars, hybrid events, virtual conferences and more?

Association Forum wants to give you access to the professional development you need to maximize the impact of e-learning. Complete this brief survey by 11:59 p.m. CT on Tuesday, May 22, to tell us whether you’re using e-learning, how and why, and you’ll receive the survey results and an executive summary report.

Your feedback will allow us to design e-learning-focused professional development offerings tailored to meet your needs. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain critical industry insight and directly shape educational programming at Association Forum!

Thanks for your help!!

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Check out this Google Insights study about Education Trends Through the Eyes of Your Customer.

In a fast-changing world, education is still in high demand online. Google looked at internal search query data, Compete clickstream data and commissioned a brand perceptions study with Ipsos OTX to understand the 2012 landscape and found:

80% of education search query paths end without a conversion.
1 in 4 education researchers never even look outside the web.
9 in 10 don’t know which school they want to attend at the onset of the journey.
2 out of every 3 researchers who use video do so to understand specific features of a school.

This refers to prospective students looking for educational institutions generally, but given that educational content is a huge reason for being for association (not to mention revenue driver), does this make you think differently about how to reach your prospective student members?

and Jamie and me!

How To Humanize Your Business

Ever get jealous that the open, unstructured social media efforts of the community completely trounce your well-planned and even well-funded social media programs? Are you frustrated when your own social media efforts are thwarted by inter-departmental competition? These problems are common, and we can no longer blame them on people “not getting” social media. The blame actually lies in the way we run our organizations. In this session the authors of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World will explore how to create organizations that are more human, thus more compatible with social media.

Learning objectives:
1. Understand the subtle ways in which our organizational “best practices” have been sabotaging our social media efforts for some time now.
2. Understand a new framework for changing culture, process, and behavior in organizations in ways that is more aligned with the power of social media.
3. Begin to develop specific strategies for changing their own organization on at least one of those three levels.

Sound interesting?  Come join me at Blogworld & New Media Expo New York on June 5, where Jamie and I will be presenting this session with a GREAT guest panelist – Amy Sample Ward, Membership Director at NTEN.  We’ll be asking Amy to describe the many efforts her organization makes  to be a truly human one.

BlogWorld & New Media Expo is the first and only industry-wide conference, tradeshow & media event for all New Media! Anyone who is creating content online with Blogging, Podcasting, Vlogging, Web TV or Internet Radio, Social Media, or New Media Content of any kind should attend.

This is the one conference where you’ll find the most comprehensive and critical knowledge for growing your business, brand and audience with the latest new media technology, methods and tools.

If you are interested in, or currently blog, podcast or vlog about business, technology, politics, sports, lifestyle & culture, general news items, celebrity gossip, marketing, entertainment, music or any other topic — you need to be here to learn how to:

• Create your blog and cover buzzworthy topics
• Make your blog stand out from the competition
• Promote your blog via distribution channels and social media
• Network with other bloggers and influencers
• Expand the audience of your podcast, video blog, web TV or internet radio show
• Produce your best podcasts, web TV, and radio shows
• Supercharge your marketing with tools like Twitter and Facebook
• Generate a diverse, loyal and interactive community around your content and company
• Respond to customer feedback with best online practices
• Measure the reach of your show, blog, and community
• Avoid problems by becoming educated on critical points for ethical online content

Save an additional 10% NOW on your Blog World New York 2012 registration with the code “SMaddie10″! Register now to take advantage of this offer.

But if you can’t make it to New York and still want to get all that BlogWorld has to offer, choose the ‘Virtual Ticket‘ when you go to register — and you can ‘attend’ from home, on your own timeframe, for a fraction of the cost.

Here’s what you get for that:

1. Video recordings (the A/V presentation plus speaker audio) of nearly all sessions at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. (You can watch these videos on the site or download them for your archives.)
2. Video recordings of nearly all sessions at the Social Media Business Summit. [INCLUDING OUR HUMANIZE SESSION]
3. MP3 audio recordings of every session in #1 and #2 above.
4. Exclusive video interviews with BlogWorld speakers that even the in-person attendees won’t get (unless, of course, they add the Virtual Ticket, which they totally should).
5. Daily exclusive audio interviews, delivered each evening during the live event.
6. Extensive social media coverage in the form of photos and updates about what’s going on live.

Thanks to Association Media & Publishing for this interesting video.  Do you have any thoughts about the future of publishing?  You know we do

(photo credit)

This post is by Jacob Smith, co-author of the The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit.  The book is so awesome that I asked Jacob to post excerpts from it here for you, every Friday over the next ten weeks.  Sit back and get comfy – you’re going to LOVE this series.  

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If there’s one thing the nonprofit world has in spades, it’s conventional wisdom. (The nonprofit has a few other things in spades, as well, like passion, commitment, and creativity, but those are topics for another day). Some of this conventional wisdom is actually quite useful. Wisdom really does accumulate over time in a community.

But conventional wisdom has some real limits, as well. For one thing, the conventional wisdom about nonprofits is, well, big. There’s a lot of it. Amazon shows close to 8,000 book titles on nonprofits, for instance. Just about any university that offers business degrees now offers nonprofit management certificates or degrees, as well. And don’t bother trying to count the number of people who make a living as nonprofit consultants (which sometimes includes us). Trying to find the really critical information amidst all that noise can be incredibly difficult, so even where the conventional wisdom includes real wisdom it can be tough to ferret out.

Another limitation: conventional wisdom tends to change much more slowly than the world around it. Moore’s Law – the remarkably accurate prediction that computer chips would double in power every eighteen months – apparently applies not only to computer processing power but also more figuratively to the rate of change in the ways people create and consume content, interact, and build communities. The conventional wisdom just can’t keep up.

Finally, the conventional wisdom about nonprofits frequently falls prey to habit and inertia. Nonprofits often end up doing things this way because it’s just how we do them. This problem isn’t unique to nonprofits, of course. Any organization or community that is around long enough develops calcified ways of doing things, and nonprofits are no exception. With roots that trace to community-focused organizations across hundreds of years, a history of formal I.R.S. recognition spanning nearly sixty years, and a dramatic growth in the professionalization and size of the nonprofit sector over the past thirty years or so (nonprofits now make up 10% of the jobs in the U.S. and 5.4% of the GDP), inertia has had ample opportunity to settle in.

We wrote The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit because we believe that nonprofits do vital work in our communities. But despite the passion, commitment, creativity, and skill that nonprofit amateurs and professionals alike bring to their work, few nonprofit organizations perform to their potential. We wrote The Nimble Nonprofit as an antidote to the limitations of the conventional wisdom about nonprofits.

Over the next ten weeks, we’ll post a series of excerpts from The Nimble Nonprofit. You may not agree with everything we say (we’re pretty sure you won’t, in fact), but we didn’t set out to offer the final word on improving the performance of nonprofit organizations. Rather, we share our observations about the skills and strategies used by the most successful nonprofit leaders in the hopes of contributing to the critical, vibrant conversations about how we can all do a better job in our work.

We are huge fans of Maddie’s work and her SocialFish blog, so the opportunity to publish a series of blog posts here is a real treat. We welcome your critiques and comments, and we look forward to the conversations.

Jacob Smith and Trey Beck

In the Future of Work Manifesto as well as in Humanize, we mention the concept of “middle-level thinking”.  I was asked recently to define this, and I realized that Jamie and I have talked a lot about it over the last few years but it’s probably high time for a refresher on what exactly we’re talking about.  Here’s the full text of a post Jamie wrote about it way back in 2006 (!!):

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The Absence of Middle-Level Thinking

Associations seem to be very good at high-level thinking. They love their vision statements and mission statements. They work hard on their keynote speeches. They really love platitudes:

•    We’re here for the members
•    Our priority is customer service
•    We support the development or perpetuation of the field

Associations are equally good at details. They love their action plans. They relish the debate about the color of next year’s annual meeting brochure. With a tradition of small staffs, it is not uncommon for senior managers to be immersed in the details of implementation throughout the year.

What associations really need to develop, however, is their middle-level thinking. They need to devote more time to discussing issues and making decisions that rise above the minutia of implementation, but have more subtlety or definition than the blanket statements of the mission and vision realm. Consider the following examples:

Strategy
Strategic plans typically start with the broad mission or vision and then present categories of activities, spelled out in detail. Plans basically “back in” to the middle level, by presenting it as the sum of all the detailed actions. Associations need to make more strategic decisions about the middle level. What really is our priority this year? Of all the things we usually do, which ones will drive our success over the next eighteen months? Those are tough decisions, but if you get clarity on them, it empowers staff to actually be more strategic during the year (rather than simply checking off to-do items from the plan).

Staff Issues
If problems or conflicts develop among staff members, the discussion tends to bounce between the high level (she’s not a team player; he’s not a good fit with our culture; we need her to be more of a leader) and the details (I saw her shopping online during work; he shouldn’t talk to me like that during staff meeting; I can’t believe she said that at a Board meeting). The opportunities for resolution, however, are in that middle level. Yes, you need to talk about the behavior, but you need to spell out how the behavior connects to those high-level conclusions. How is “team player” defined, and why, quite frankly, does everyone need to be one? What really is the culture here and will that drive our success? What is the impact of leadership style on what we are doing? When you work through those discussions, the examination of behavior is more meaningful and effective.

Program Evaluation
There was an article in Forum magazine in May 2006 examining how to decide to cut long-standing programs that perfectly demonstrated the lack of a middle level. The questions they posed tended to be high level (does this program impact the mission?) or detailed (what is the net revenue?). Those are both important, but you need some middle level analysis for this decision as well. How does this program impact our brand? Does this program help us develop internal capacity that helps us in other areas? Is this program taking resources away from our mid-level strategic direction? Without the middle level in this discussion, your evaluation tool becomes too blunt an instrument.