For those of you who missed my webinar last week with Higher Logic, here are some highlights: Before you implement a cross-channel distribution plan, ask yourself a few questions: Which platforms? Most professionals gravitate to Linkedin but executives are increasingly embracing Twitter. Which groups? Do some research and find where you members and prospective members [...]

Leaders: born or made? Sales people: born or made? Terrorists: born or made? Geniuses: born or made? Artists? Great men? Great women? Bad drivers? ??? The answer, if you care to read all of these, is both. There is a certain ‘you got it or you don’t’ aspect and then there is a ‘use it [...]

Pain is soon forgotten. It is one of the great human coping mechanisms. Otherwise, mothers would never have a second child. Marathoners would never run a second race. No one would ever fall in love because of the potential pain of loss. Recessions are painful and long and not soon forgotten. But we do forget, [...]

The future of books is bookless, or maybe it’s just the future of libraries. Stanford’s new engineering library was built to hold 85% fewer books. 85%! A study before the construction showed that most of the collection had not been off the shelves in 5 years. The university says that it can envision the day [...]

Some of the best ideas out there come from small associations. There’s nothing like being a staff of one to focus the mind and make you come up with creative ways of getting things done. At the ASAE Membership and Marketing Conference last week, associations were talking about crowd sourcing, member segmentation and all sorts [...]

I spoke at the sold-out ASAE Membership & Marketing Conference last week and these are the smartest things I heard. “The rise of the curator class has created a new generation of social and creative directors and editors.” –John Winsor, founder of Victors & Spoils,the world’s first ad agency built on crowdsourcing. Offer a chance [...]

“The value of a business is an expectation of future growth.” David Carr’s The Media Equation column  in the New York Times is a must-read for me. There’s no one doing a better job of charting the change/demise of media as we know it than Carr. Memorial Day, writing about Newsweek going on the block [...]

What’s worth doing? That is not meant as a rhetorical, shall-I-get-out-of-bed-this-morning question. People who know me will tell you that I have a very short but intense attention span. I can be passionately interested in something and want to know everything about it for a while—typically the length of time it would take me to [...]

One of the speeches I made recently focused on non-dues revenue. (They all do to some extent.) One of the attendees actually said, “But we’re an association. We don’t have to work like a ‘real’ business.” Where shall I start with how wrong that is?

We have a book at home called something like Hold Tight the Old Ways. It’s about Native American culture and the importance of preserving traditions, practices, societies. But there does come a time when you should move on with the little things that are familiar but no longer really useful. Buy the horseless carriage. Give [...]