Nice article on how not to run a brainstorming session: Six great ways to ruin a brainstorming session – InnovationTools. Spotted via James Robertson.
Author Archives: David
Blowback
The CEO at View from a Corner Office has some disturbing news from a meeting of her association’s international federation organization:
It’s hard to discuss the international dimension of our work as association executives without delving at least to some degree into the effect of the present administration’s foreign relations policy on how those outside the United States perceive us. In this particular federation the animus toward the United States is so pronounced that for the first time in the federation’s history, all U.S. delegates for office toppled in defeat. If it’s possible to be stunned but not surprised, that was our reaction. At the same time the federation issued a ballot asking member nations to support a dues overhaul that would increase the U.S. share by 8,000%. That is not a typo.
It has been a while since I’ve worked the international side of the business but I can’t say that that reaction surprises me. Unilateralism is completely antithetical to the mission and nature of associations. It’s going to take many years to rebuild trust around the world.
Event Blogging, But Not What You Expected
A Minneapolis blogger got in on the ASAE event blogging, although in a way that I bet the conference organizers didn’t anticipate:
Ooooh, my freakin’ ears. What am I talking about? The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE, I linked their site because that name just sounds too made up), that’s what. They are having a ‘little’ conference outside my apartment. By little I mean they have about four city blocks barricaded and they are all eating, drinking, and networking their heads off. Oh, one other thing. Pretend that you could marry the music of 90’s adult contemporary with smooth jazz; ahh soothing right? Well then imagine a female-male lead singing duo on crack belting out ‘today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites’ (They just did a bone-chilling rendition of Outkast’s Hey Ya). Yeah, and according to the conference itinerary I’ve got a couple more hours to go. Where’s my damn earplugs? Ugh.
That is a pretty accurate description of the party that was thrown Saturday night to open up the meeting. And that easy listening band was truly horrendous.
I came across the post by searching Technorati on Tuesday morning. My plan was to demonstrate the site during a presentation I was doing that afternoon and talk about how associations should start using it to monitor how the blogging world is covering their issues and organizations. What a perfect example! If it’s any consolation, anonymous Minneapolis law student, the attendees in the session seemed to agree that the band was pretty bad.
I also talked about what kind of PR damage that entry could have done if it had been picked up by the local media. Hell, Technorati has a CNN advisory gig so it might go national. OK, that was a pretty low risk, but it could happen. The media seem to love blog-related stories these days.
In the session, I suggested that buying the blogger in question a free dinner or giving him some noise-canceling headphones might be a nice gesture to apologize for interupting his evening and could help turn the story into a postive if it did get picked up. That would have been money well spent to avert a more negative story and at the least would be the right thing to do. Of course, that requires keeping up with what is going on in the blogging world via tools such as Technorati.
In any case, thanks for sharing your neighborhood with us and for giving me a great example for the session I spoke in.
This Turn Down Service Brought to You by Acme!
Can we all agree that this is a bit much? Stuff under the door at night or left with the newspaper in the morning is ok, but I’d like to be able to get in bed without having to remove the marketing material from the covers first.
BTW, I’ve got lots of notes from the conference so far that may take me a day or two to get converted into posts here. Hope to get to it soon….
Last little bit on AMS/CMS deployment timing
In our session yesterday I had the opportunity to ask Loretta DeLuca of DelCor Technology Solutions what she thought about deploying an AMS and a CMS simultaneously. (Loretta is one of the more experienced AMS selection consultants out there.) She said she wouldn’t recommend it either but for slightly different reasons than I have been yammering on about here. Her main concern was that trying to develop your ‘front-office’ systems (the CMS) while still developing, deploying and configuring your ‘back-office’ system (the AMS) is inviting lots of backtracking and crises you need not have to deal with if you wait for the AMS deployment to be complete before ramping up on the CMS project. Waiting lets the AMS settle down so that it isn’t a moving integration target for the CMS. Makes sense to me.
OK, I think that dead horse is well and truly beaten. I’ll move on to something else soon. 🙂
What controversy?
Jeffrey Zeldman revisits web standards evangelism after some time off the rubber chicken circuit. I guess I’m not reading in the right places but I’ve never had a sense that there were huge rifts in the standards social club (other than RSS of course). I never felt turned off towards adopting standards once I learned about the benefits from reading folks such as Zeldman and Meyer. Maybe the controversy rings loudest to those in the middle of it?
On the ground
Made it to Minneapolis with no problems and have settled in at the Double Tree. They give you a warm cookie when you check in. I recommend that all hotels begin doing this. Yummy.
Got our handouts for our pre-con session tomorrow copied at the local Kinkos, since I put the finishing touches on them during the flight. We’re supposed to turn them in weeks before the meeting but that didn’t happen for several very good reasons. Really. Bad speaker! I’ll probably throw a copy of them up on this site next week if my co-presenters are willing.
As I worked on the presentation I read a story about how Hershey Foods tried to implement CRM, ERP and supply chain managements systems simultaneously. This apparently failed in a rather spectacular way: they weren’t able to delivery candy to major customers in time for Halloween in 1999. Ouch. More reason to think twice before implementing a content management system and an association management system (CRM) at the same time.
Minneapolis
Off to Minneapolis tomorrow for ASAE’s annual meeting. So far I have heard of 5 blogs that will be written from the meeting.
Calendar Standards
Lisa Dusseault has posted about how the CalDAV standard that she proposed is picking up a bit of steam:
This is all great news. Calendaring interoperability has languished except for that burst of productivity back in 1998. People are locked into one calendar application depending on what server technology they have available, since there’s no common calendar access standard. Invitations work, kinda, but in practice the problems with recurrances mean that people must follow up the machine-readable text with human-readable text in case a mistake was made between two different vendors’ software.
Good news, but nowhere near done yet — this is just the beginning. Now we need volunteers. We need people to write specification text, review text, and manage the issues. We need people simply to pay attention to the work being done and provide their experience, or simply opinions, to bring issues to resolution.
I’m excited to hear about this effort. Effective calendar sharing is probably one of the major failings of most personal information management systems, open or commercial. Of course, the OSAF group that Lisa works with is trying to change all that.
The CAE Candidate Blog
When it rains it pours association blogs. Here is a blog by Ben Martin where he is writing about his experience as he prepares for the CAE exam. Good luck Ben! Writing about that in public takes guts since you never know if you’ll pass or not. 🙂 Ben, I hope you’ll keep writing long after you get the CAE.
By the way, my study notes for the CAE are posted on this site. They are a couple years old but should still be useful.
C. David Gammel, CAE 