Happy New Year from The Association Innovation Blog! I want to wish everyone who reads this blog, everyone in the association community and everyone, everywhere for that matter a very happy 2005. I hope those of us who really care about the future of associations and who share a concern about the way things are going can find a way to work together to make 2005 a remarkable year for this extraordinarily important community of ours! I look forward to using TAIB as a vehicle for advancing those efforts.
Before I get to the actual post, let me just add a quick plug for my 100th post to TAIB. Tomorrow, I will have been blogging for exactly 16 months (my first post was September 2, 2003) and I am going to keep on blogging in 2005. In fact, I hope I will spend more time writing (and recording...sorry text lovers!) this blog, because it is something that I genuinely enjoy. Thank you all for reading and listening. I greatly appreciate your continued support.
I don't think anyone will be shocked by my choice of innovation as the top issue for the association community in 2005. Perhaps the first four issues--the (impending) death of best practices, competition, new science and technology and intangibles--were actually clues designed to guide you toward this final choice. (Hmm...am I that clever? ;>) And I suppose it might seem like a bit of self-serving choice, since innovation is "my thing." I might even willingly plead guilty to that charge. But I know deep inside that this is the work we must do and that we're meant to do. I know that in the 21st Century, associations are destined to transform the landscape of society for the better, and our only hope for seizing the initiative and setting that agenda is devoting ourselves to the whats, whys and hows of innovation today.
I get that many association leaders don't agree with my views on the need for innovation. I understand that I'm probably tilting at windmills a little bit. Nevertheless, I don't believe I'm on a quixotic mission to make association innovation (which some regard as an oxymoron I know) more possible. Rather, I see this difference of opinion as a golden opportunity to convince our colleagues and our community to at least consider an alternative (and likely more successful) approach to creating the vibrant future to which I know we're all committed. Toward that end, let me share with you a quotation from a February 2002 Harvard Business Review article that I recently rediscovered:
Managers are not paid to make the inevitable happen. In most organizations, the ordinary routines of business chug along without much managerial oversight. The job of managers, therefore, is to make the business do more than chug--to move it forward in innovative, surprising ways.
I've been thinking about this quotation for several weeks now because it is a simple, yet profound insight into what should be happening inside our organizations. And I'm wondering what we could create if we were to heed these words and act on them everyday. My intuition tells me that we would become the wellsprings of extraordinary creation, brimming with possibility and meaning. If we can believe that is true, then we should not allow anything to stand in our way of embracing our true destiny.
It's a brand new year. Let us begin.
Happy new year Jeff! Love the chugging quote.
Keep on tilting.
Posted by: David Gammel | January 03, 2005 at 11:01 AM
What I like about your blog, Jeff, is that it's thought-provoking. This one made me think of a post-it note a colleague in our art department passed along to me -- on it are three simple, but inspiring words: Escape the Ordinary.
Happy new year to all.
Posted by: Jerry Elprin | January 03, 2005 at 09:42 AM