Top 5 Issues for 2005!

To close out 2004, I have decided to post (in ascending order) the top five issues I hope we will be talking about in the association community during 2005.  I can't guarantee that we will talk about them, but I will do my part to drive those conversations and I hope you will as well.

I will post #5 and #4 tomorrow and #3 and #2 on Friday.  The #1 post will come on January 1, 2005 and may well end up as my 100th post.  If you want to suggest an issue for #1 that will also make it the 100th post, please post your comment below.  As always, your comments on what I write are encouraged and welcomed!

Comments

[Jeff De Cagna]

Paul, I think your points are very well taken. We need to move beyond traditional notions of competition, as I tried to suggest in my posting on competition as the #4 issue of 2005. Associations face competition from many directions, but cannot afford to play their competitors' games if they are going to survive and thrive. Rather, they must reconceive the very way they approach their strategic work, quite possibly in the manner you suggest. I believe that associations can play in Kim and Mauborgne's "blue oceans," and I believe that associations can create strategic ecosystems of stakeholders that act in concert to create value rather than competing. There is definitely more than one way to approach this issue and I thank you for raising it here. Let continue to the conversation!

[Paul Borawski]

I don't know how to fit this in the "stream," I'm a blog novice, but Kevin Holland's comment about competition drew my interest. I've worked for professional associations for 26 years and we've always talked about competition. We live in a competitive society. Win - lose. "Winning is the only thing" – Vince Lombardi gave us. I wonder how strategy would change if we put our interest in front of winning. Don't get me wrong. I think we need to by aware of what's going on in our marketplaces and aware of the forces at work. Given that most of us face more opportunity that we have resources to pursue, what if we began thinking of all the participants in the marketplace as some kind of system to optimize? Would such a view, of necessity, be to our economic disfavor, or could a system view produce greater economic outcome. Clearly I don't have the answer, but would welcome an exploration. Could we all win bigger? In such an environment what cooperation and collaboration could emerge that we don't understand yet? What member loyalty might emerge if they saw their associations working to optimize a system instead of the association? Is this a naive view long ago proven to lead to ruin, or is this emergent thinking at a time when old models increasingly fail to produce the results they once had?

[Kevin Holland]

IMHO, the #1 issue facing associations is competition. A story to illustrate: At a meeting last spring I had a brief conversation with another association staffer and in the course of the conversation asked her who her competition was. She mentioned two other associations.

Just out of curiosity, later that night I looked up their organization's website. Made a note of their market and the types of programs they provide. Went to Google and in just a few minutes identified over 20 companies that, in some way or another, were competing with the organization's products and services -- some specifically targeting their market segment, others more general in focus but who were very effectively serving that market.

As associations, we have a lot of competitors and they are coming from different places than they used to. We have to be careful in identifying them, understanding them, and competing with them.

[Denham]

My #1 spot is increasing personal & group 'awareness'.

* Assisting individuals to network for knowledge
* Providing access to news, learning and personal development
* Helping participants collaborate and grow
* Stimulating dialog and knowledge transfers

This can be aggregated as 'making members more aware' of each other, of issues, of the changing environment, of opportunities, of knowledge gaps, of emergent drivers.