As every independent consultant knows, The Day of Rest is usually just another day in the office. Certainly that is true when you're leaving town the next morning on a business trip as I am tomorrow. I'm heading out of town to do a gig and visit a new client. (Yeah!) Since I'm try to get ready for the trip, I only have a few minutes to post today. So, instead of a detailed blog on a single subject, I'm going to post a few tidbits that I'll try to elaborate on going forward.
+In its March 5, 2004 issue, Association Trends published an opinion piece I've written supporting the idea of a developing a new master's degree for the association community. (As I write this posting, the article is not yet online. I'm hoping it will be soon, and I will let you know if and when it appears.) I feel strongly that our profession needs to update and re-define its intellectual core for the future, an effort we are already seeing take place in the major professions, including business, medicine, law, architecture and library science. The world in which associations operate is changing in dramatic and irrevocable ways, and we owe it to the next generation of leaders in this community to offer a way to prepare that connects with the future they can expect to confront.
In my view, the arguments lodged against such a degree offering--it costs too much, there isn't a critical mass of students, people don't stay in profession long enough--represent nothing more than a misplaced commitment to the status quo. All graduate education costs money, so that argument isn't that relevant to me, as long as the quality is there. As for the question of whether there is a sufficient number of potential students willing to stay the course in the association community, perhaps it is worth considering whether we would now have more students staying the course had we taken this issue more seriously sooner. I'm not saying that the failed attempts to create master's degree programs in the past (in both DC and Chicago) lacked seriousness of purpose. But I am suggesting that since those efforts did not pan out, further attempts to pursue the idea of a rigorous, interdisciplinary master's degree program have been dismissed as impractical. But we live in a different world today than we did 10-15 years ago, and as I and others have said, the association community is in desperate need of original thinking. Toward that end, I believe that we need to toss out our outdated assumptions about the difficulties of developing meaningful graduate education in associations and consider just how much is possible if we put our minds to it. (More to come on this issue...)
+The March 2004 issue of Chief Executive magazine includes as its cover article, "Slaves to the Clock", an examination of the challenges that CEOs and senior executives face in controlling their schedules enough to have time for strategic thinking and reflection. It's an interesting article that doesn't really offer a silver bullet to solve the problem (primarily because their isn't one) other than what we already know: we must police our own schedules to ensure that our time is being used wisely, and we have to get better at saying no to those commitments to which we cannot add value or which are simply less important than they are urgent.
One useful approach discussed in the article is to organize your schedule according to your organization's strategic priorities. Of course, using this approach depends on the ability of the CEO and/or senior executive to clearly articulate what those priorities are and then have the discipline to put them first consistently. We know that this kind of strategic clarity and discipline is difficult to achieve, especially in the association community. But it is a worthwhile goal and one that should be pursued.
+There is an interesting article on blogs and blogging in the April 2004 issue of Fast Company that isn't yet online. (It should be in the next week or so.) According to the article, the "blog world" now numbers more than 1.6 million people, including yours truly. What I find so remarkable about this figure is how few blogs there appear to be in the association world. (At present, I am only aware of four active blogs that deal in some way with associations. If there are others, please let me know right away!) Once again, it feels a bit as though we are lagging behind in our willingness to leverage powerful technologies even after they have already gained acceptance in other quarters of our society. Still, I remain hopeful that The Association Innovation Blog, as well as other blogs, will lead the way in generating interest in and increasing the use of weblogs across the association community.
By the way, I just want to remind everyone that blogging is intended to be an interactive effort. As such, I hope you will consider commenting on my observations--random and otherwise--so that we can create some meaningful dialogue around the important issues facing our community. I look forward to the conversation!
Hi, Jeff.
Thanks for letting me know about your blog. I signed up when you announced your quest for 1,000 subscribers, so I'm still hoping for that Starbucks card . . .
I agree that association management needs a solid graduate degree program to prepare new leaders for a challenging career. I don't understand what the problem is; many areas of study in the liberal arts (including my personal favorite, political science) are interdisciplinary and require study in multiple areas.
I also enjoyed your comments on managing time. We all have the power of choice, so why not use that power to make decisions to benefit ourselves and our organizations? We all need time to think, a much under rated -- and under pursued -- past time.
Posted by: Cecilia Sepp | March 08, 2004 at 09:35 AM
Hey Jeff - I've been enjoying your blog and look forward to future updates.
I'm guessing you aren't including Techno Prophet in your four. We've put together this blog to share technology related information as it pertains to non-profits specifically, and it is maintained exclusively by non-profit folks, not tech vendors.
I hope you and others find it useful. You can find it at: http://www.technoprophet.org/
Posted by: George Breeden | March 08, 2004 at 09:03 AM