Ann Oliveri

Welcome

What if for every hour you worked or volunteered, you could earn more, learn more, connect with peers, improve as a leader and change the world for the better? 

That's the Zen of Associations. This blog is for those of us who believe that a life of purpose is the ultimate member benefit and leadership development our true mission.

Ann Oliveri is a game-changing leadership coach and consultant with 30 years experience in association management making ideas happen. Her name tag ribbons include: FASAE, CAE, ACC and MBA.

Sense-making Shortage

What skills do your members need to be in demand going forward? 

The Institute for the Future  identifies and defines the top ten Future Work Skills that will be in short-supply in 2020 (my translation are in parentheses).Love this stuff:

Sense-making (Meaning): The ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed.

Social Intelligence (Heart): The ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions.

Novel & Adaptive Thinking (Creativity): Proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based.

Cross-Cultural Competency (Tolerance): The ability to operate in different cultural settings.

Computational Thinking (Reasoning): The ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning.

New-Media Literacy (Communication): The ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication.

Trans-disciplinarity (Connect the Dots): Literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.

Design Mindset (Woo hoo!): The ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes.

Cognitive Load Management (Curation): The ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques

Virtual Collaboration: The ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

 

Beyond Wordle

Text Is Beautiful goes beyond creating "word clouds" by filtering source text through analytics software to distill "concept clouds."

To try it out, I pasted in the text of an essay I wrote, Associations as Engines of Change, my manfesto on what I believe associations' true potential to be.  My results follow. Try it out for youself and see what it reveals. 

How Coaching Works

 Here's one of the most effective explanations of How Coaching Works I've seen.  It's less than four mintues and is an animated stick-figure video without dialog.  Delightful!

 

 

Thanks to Coach Meg and Wellcoaches for this YouTube video. For more information, see her archived feature article on CoachingCommons.org.

Dan Pink on Thinkr

Dan Pink's latest book repurposes our traditional thinking about sales and the skills you need to win others over: attunement, buoyance, and clarity.  Sales for the 21st century.  Thanks, again, Dan.

 

Culture Wars

You know it's bad when CFOs flock to learning labs at ASAE's annual meeting on how to change the culture at work. 

Most described truly toxic situations, if not open warfare, between factions, staff factions not board politics! In some cases, I knew the CEOs and was stunned that they were MIA. Are they retiring in place? OBE (Overtaken By Events)? Burnt out?

The generational divide conversation has been replaced by tales of old school vs new school stand-offs.  With all the attention on shiny new toys and new faces, long-time employees feel as if they are being branded as the problem with nothing to contribute. Change initiatives have a manic quality, quickly abandoned for the Next New Thing. 

ADD is the new MBA.

In every story, it was clear that there was a complete absence of leadership and basic management functions. No one is in charge. No wonder CFOs were in search of answers. What's going on? 

Collaborative leadership doesn't mean chaos, people! If you're not up to the task, seek help or step aside for someone who is.

The Power of Tic-Tac-Toe

A speaker at ASAE 2012, Andrew Greenblatt, opened the consultant's four-box window, hurdled past x and y axes, and trampolined over the Venn diagram of social responsibility.

By simply shifting to a tic-tac-toe board, the conversation changed. And that was his point. Change the conversation on social responsibility by disarming your audience and find sustainable ground.

Here's how he did it. By labeling the three columns of the nine-box hashtag as loses money, breaks even and makes money, he tracked ideas--most of which fall in the first (loser) column. The usual ideas all cost money, so he  pauses and says: In these economic times, even good ideas that lose money are non-starters.

With that one move, he changed the conversation. The tic-tac-toe board assumes there are other options so the mind shifts.

Tic-tac-toe is a game of strategy and by its very nature it's dynamic.  How can you use this gameboard to advance the conversation?

Project Runway Prezi

For our Monday Project Runway session, I built a basic Prezi to give everyone the big picture on the design exercise--avoiding the brain damage of PowerPoint.  You can find my simple Prezi in the cloud, accessible to all, view it, copy it and save it if you want. If you don't have an account yet, you can sign up and use Prezi for free if you don't mind sharing your work.

Simple is fine, but now I want to make it dance.  For ideas on what you can do, click on the Explore tab. My favorite is former Joie de Vivre CEO and author Chip Conley's Emotional Equations Prezi for SXSW. Don't miss the suitcase video. Makes me happy just recalling it.  As Chip would say, Joy = Love - Fear.

Project Runway Design Challenge

Are you ready to design your wardrobe of leadership styles? Join Rhea Blanken and I on Monday morning at ASAE 2012 in Dallas for our Project Runway leadership session.  Hubtag #ASAE12LB7.

Grab a good seat and watch your peers strut their stuff, showing off some well-known styles. Then work in a team to design the style best suited to your group. 

The exercise uses the As One methodology synthesized by Deloitte in a two-year research project and published in 2010.  Here's Deloitte's video explanation of what it's all about.

   

Leadership by Design

 Do you try out new recipes on dinner guests? 

Fair Warning: I do. And that's why I am teaming up with Rhea Blanken of Cooking Up Leadership fame to pilot a leadership workshop at ASAE 2012 next week, loosely based on the reality TV show, Project Runway.

When asked, a dozen association leaders jumped into the deep end of the pool, agreeing to be stylin' some of the leadership classics or referee the fun. Participants will design a leadership wardrobe for an association exec, tailoring the most productive style for the people and purpose served.

Although the session handout catalogs more than 30 schools of thought on leadership, we will showcase a small sample.The design exercise narrows the field further using Deloitte's As One model as the designers' palette.

Hope you can "Make It Work" and join us at the Project Runway Learning Lab on Monday morning in Dallas. Hubtag #ASAE12LB7

 

Wireless Mind

 

One of the most creative advocacy ads yet from CTIA--Wireless Mind. Beautiful.