Be the Change
“Be the change you want to see in the world,” said Mahatma Ghandi.
I’ve just come back from India where elections are underway. Added to the already fascinating cultural boil of the country, seeing the world’s largest democracy at work was galvanizing. Thousands of people in white streaming toward an open-air rally, flags and banners, giant garlands of marigolds, SUVs with the party’s symbol emblazoned on their doors and bullhorns blaring from their roofs, drums and chanting added to the daily din of traffic and horns. Hot and dusty sitting in the resulting gridlock, and then out into the countryside where you see that the religious divide that so often determines election outcomes in India is running smack up against the continuing inability to meet the lowest rung on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for much of the population.
If democracy did not so often dead-end into corruption in India, the country might have a chance of successfully pulling its people out of the Middle Ages and into the 21st century. It’s difficult—even surreal—to square glass-fronted high rises and highly educated high tech workers with families living in tents made out of black plastic bags on the sidewalks of Delhi.
What does this all have to do with you? With associations? India is on the other side of the world and even those of us who believe that we are all citizens of the world, even associations that are actively working in India find it difficult to remember that that hot, dusty march is still going on while we sit in our air conditioned offices surrounded by our clean city streets, unencumbered by children with dirty hands extended and huge dark eyes pleading.
Here’s another quote that perhaps makes it more tangible.
“The project portfolio—the array of investments in projects and programs a company chooses to pursue—is the agent of change, and the success of change initiatives depends on the ability to select and manage the projects that deliver the change.”
(From Executing Your Strategy: How to Break It Down and Get It Done.)
In other words, you are the change that will happen in the world whether you know it or not. The projects you pursue as an organization—globalization, digital engagement, innovation, generational repositioning, branding, etc., etc., etc.—aren’t just tasks to be completed. Your strategic plan is not a checklist that you can happily fill out and then go back to being who you were.
Nothing is going to go back to where it was. That was already the case given the competition within associations from members themselves. But the recession has accelerated the change, made it more obvious not to mention more painful.
Your project portfolio has doubtless undergone a radical transformation in recent months. Meetings cancelled, budgets pored over, cuts made, some things outsourced and others re-insourced, the chance in some cases to eliminate things still in the inventory long past their useful life.
But that is not the change you want to see. What you do next is.
A proactive project portfolio (rather than a duck-and-cover reaction) will provide the same sort of galvanizing force as the marchers rallying for change in India. The recession will end; generational shifts will not. The economy will recover; digital engagement will win over older networking tactics. People will always need associations but increasingly they will want a fully customizable experience rather than one-size-fits-all membership. Your project portfolio has the power to make you a force in that change.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
[...] all heard Mahatma Ghandi’s dictum, “Be the change.” I’ve already blogged about it once. Young people understand on some level that they are the force of change. If [...]