I’ve been thinking a lot about business models—not in concrete terms but as they play into what organizations in general are struggling with. We can’t reinvent healthcare because it would cost businesses more money. We can’t reinvent climate legislation because it would put a lot of companies out of business. In other words, the business models that exist worked when they were put in place but even if they are no longer appropriate to our needs, dismantling them in favor of something else—something untried—is terrifying and disruptive.
There are several very large companies that own the energy industry. They’re not evil companies (not all of them anyway); they’re not all against legislation to rectify climate change. But they can’t just vote themselves out of existence.
A couple of months ago, I interviewed Paul Anderson for one of our magazines. He’s a former C-level executive with several huge companies in the energy, automotive and metals industries. He cited the example of a new technology that was being developed while he was CEO of BHP Billiton in Australia. It would have displaced conventional blast furnaces.
“But we had blast furnaces,” he said. “In essence, it would have made everything we had obsolete.” Instead, they entered into a joint venture with another company. “We put it into a market other than our own and obsoleted the blast furnaces over there.”
Associations too are struggling with revamping outdated business models, models built on print publications, live meetings, controlled messaging. Just as people develop an unlimited appetite for content—anytime, anywhere, round-the-clock—the business model that pays the people who create that content falls apart.
That’s part of association’s we-can’t-do-this-because mentality. It doesn’t fit in the business model; there’s no way to pay for it and we don’t have the time or the resources to just go for it.
Kevin Holland, division VP for business operations and membership at the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, writes in Associations Now that associations look alike and provide similar services—meetings, publications, etc.—because that’s the way they’re built now. He worries that they will substitute webinars for meetings, blogs for newsletters and call it reinvention.
So how do you build a new house while you’re still living in the old one? How do you rip out the foundation without having the whole structure come down on your head? How do you “obsolete” someone else’s business rather than your own?
This is going to sound like heresy but focus on your mission instead of your members. Focus on what you’re trying to accomplish together rather than who’s doing it.
“Our growth is based on what we do not on who we do it for,” says Stephen Lieber CAE, president and CEO of the Healthcare Information Management Society. “No one asks the question ‘what have you done for me lately,’ instead it’s ‘what have we done to improve the delivery of healthcare through technology.’ The focus is on the end result not on the individuals or companies working to achieve that result.”
HIMSS has grown from $9 million in revenues to $42 million in the last nine years but only increased membership from 17,000 to 23,000. Mission-based programs are the difference; dues are only 10% to 12% of overall revenues.
IEEE is taking over production of IBM’s online Journal of Research and Development. The association is one of the largest publishers of engineering, computing and technology information, so leveraging their publishing infrastructure gives them a new business model that helps accomplish their mission of “advancing innovation and technological excellence for the benefit of humanity.”
According Naveen Maddali, the association’s online services product manager “IEEE has a vision of becoming a leading resource of technology and innovation, and growing our portfolio of content will lead that. The IBM journals directly fit into this plan. Additionally, the high quality content in these journals represents a nice revenue opportunity for both IEEE and IBM.”
What are you trying to accomplish? If you could start from scratch, what would you do to accomplish that goal? Forget what you do now. What would make the most sense in this brave, new reinventable world? Are you the one who’s going to be made obsolete?
