Ann Oliveri

Before You Blame the Economy

The author of the management classic "The Abilene Paradox," GWU professor emeritus Jerry Harvey wrote another book that helped me make the leap to greater levels of management responsibility: "How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife?"

The same lessons apply to beleaguered marketing managers, struggling to lift response rates in the face of the financial meltdown.

Yesterday, I spoke with a long-time friend and colleague who recently stepped into a new marketing management role in her association.  I happened to mention a membership session at the Great Ideas Conference that stressed the need to review the basics, like including a phone number, and she agreed wholeheartedly.  

So far, in her first three days on the job, she has caught out-of-date postage indicia, broken links, and typos in fax numbers in every promotion, pending approval. With layoffs and staff changes, the old safety nets may no longer catch these kinds of errors.

So before you blame the economy for poor response rates, look for the obstacles to response you may be putting in your own path.  Thanks, Lori!  

Fans of the Journal of Association Leadership Unite

I love the Journal of Association Leadership.  Maybe it's the name or the mix of articles or the smart people who support it, but I love it and want to share the love.

How can the Journal be more accessible? More valuable? Editor Peter Hutchins and I are pulling together an ad hoc task group to figure this out and we need your ideas.

For example, I spoke with David Gammel yesterday who suggested that we look at AListApart.com, an online journal for people who make websites.  Just think what we could do if the Journal of Association Leadership worked like this! 

How would you make the Journal a rock star?  

Being Human

In Miami, Patti Digh opened the final day at the Great Ideas Conference, sharing what she is learning as a mother of two girls as well as from the growing community attracted by her work, her blog, and her book, Life is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally.

Watch her presentation and especially note her approach to confronting complex problems, like raising children or becoming socially responsible.  It will instantly reduce stress and confirm what you know to be true about being human.

The best part of opening the day with this experience was seeing how it changed the rest of my day: how my perspective shifted; how I interacted with people; how I absorbed meaning from the sessions that followed.

Fortunately, the final session I participated in was Doug Stevenson's session on Emotional Eloquence: The Lost Language of Leadership.  Doug demonstrates and reveals how to connect with any audience, to both inspire and teach, and to be a truly authentic leader, all in 75 minutes.  We learned how to "speak from our head with our heart wide open," creating trust with story and maintaining an emotional connection with those we wish to lead.  It was 75 minutes I will never forget.  Using his approach, you can be just as memorable.

On reflection, I can see all of these ideas in one participant who happened to choose four of the same sessions I did and I got to know better over three days.   Mindy Walker works out of Kansas City for the Missouri State Teachers Association.  Her stories of early career experiences teaching in correctional facilities, raising two boys, and now showing up in the schools where her members teach brought home to me how being human is at the heart of all our work.

Before you cut your association's travel budgets, think twice.  Now is the time you show up, to literally be there for your members.  Crowd the bench where they sit, as Patti said.  Tell the stories that connect us together, as Doug said.  Be human at work, online, and by phone.  Live intentionally.

You Must Be Present to Win

The Great Ideas Conference isn't really about others' clever ideas--although you will be slapped with a few great ones.(Take a look at the video of Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin presentation on the GIC web page.)

The Great Ideas Conference is a temporary idea ecosystem that allows you to evolve and adapt. That's why yesterday, day three of what felt like a week away, synapses started  closing and I found myself sheepishly saying "duh" more than once.  And, I distinctly heard others doing the same. 

Like the Social Responsibility Summit last year, the best part of this meeting was discovering who opted in.  Apparently, the frightened and overwhelmed stayed home because none were in attendance. Although I saw a few long-time friends and familiar characters, the most remarkable thing was connecting with a half dozen amazing people, most new to the field or their position, both new CEOs and experienced others stepping into new roles. The connection felt more like a gravitational pull and we instantly recognized each other.

So if you are worried about attendance at your key meetings, get your head around the fact that the right people will show up this year and you will find out where to go from there.

WOM Meme - Reputation

Asked to pile on with an example of Word of Mouth, I can offer up an experience running a New Member/First Meeting breakfast at the Urban Land Institute's Fall Meeting.

ULI is not the easiest organization to figure out and retention statistics in the 1990s showed that half the new members dropped out after one year.  After three years, though, those remaining stayed for life--retention stats ran up into the 90th percentiles.  

At the time, most new members equated ULI with its Fall Meeting, so we invited all the new people to breakfast to meet other members and get answers to their questions.  Most new members attended, about 10% of the total meeting attendance, showing up at 7:00 a.m. to hear a pitch for something they had already purchased.

Every year, I started by asking how many wanted to know how to get on a council.  Every year, half the audience stood up.  When asked about their interest, all said that they had no idea what a council was, but people they trusted told them to try to get on one.

Individual council members pay ULI more than $5,000 each year in dues and registration fees for two one-day council meetings and two conferences.  Retention, even in economic downturns, is above 90%.

That's Word of Mouth.

Innovacion

Visiting the Mendoza wine country at the foot of the Andes, a desert lushly irrigated by aqueducts first built by the Incas, we toured two bodegas (wineries), one of the oldest and one of the newest.

The oldest, Familia di Tommaso, in business since 1869 and run by descendants of the original owners, is a heritage site hand-crafting 60,000 cases of wine sold from the cellar door.  The most striking feature, though, was the water pouring through irrigation channels weeks before harvest.

The newest winery we visited was Familia Zuccardi, founded in 1963. Alberto Zuccardi emigrated to Argentina from Italy via the Napa Sonoma Valley to introduce a new irrigation method.  From those demonstration vines has grown a small empire producing some extraordinary wine in vast quantities for export--not done before Zuccardi harnessed the technology and marketing know-how.

Expecting a dreary industrial complex, we were absolutely delighted with our tour and tasting at Zuccardi.  Our personal guide was Charles from the UK doing his gap year in the wine trade in Argentina.  But what struck me most was the fact that it took an outsider to see the potential for export and the savvy to create blends of the traditional Malbec for those markets.  The drive to improve quality continues, grafting new varietals to find out what this terroir can produce and testing baby wines only available at cellar door labeled Innovacion.

Seeing opportunity requires new eyes, not just new glasses.

In contrast, other emigres from the Napa Sonoma, The Vines of Mendoza, have done little more than graft the pretentious tech entrepreneurs and dentists that now dominate California wine onto a charming wine district.  Ew. For the straight scoop on Argentina wine, check out the Wine Republic. 

Since we traveled light, Bill is bringing home a case of Rutini Cab-Malbec, the best bottle of wine for the money we tasted.  Found it in Mendoza, thanks to the sommelier at Azafran.  Bill finally figured out a way to get the price down to $US15 a bottle so it's worth hauling home.

ISO Argentina

Traveling to South America for the first time, we thought Argentina would be an easy place to start.  (Check out the photo album for an overview of our trip.)  In addition to our detailed Buenos Aires street map, oriented south to north, and an extensive glossary of  cuts of beef never mentioned in U.S. restaurants, the most valuable guide to appreciating the culture and contradictions of this country turned out to be the hefty Argentina Reader.

Nothing like the rest of the continent, Argentina serves up familiar Mediterranean traditions transplanted to a harsher colonial terrain.

Like Australia, time and distance and immigration shaped its relationship with the rest of the world. Like Turkey, its politics requires one to simultaneously grasp mutually exclusive ideas, like authoritarian democracy. And like the former Yugoslavia, it's clear that memories are long and divisions deep.

Yet, like American jazz, the best expression of Argentina is tango--from milonga to modern fusion.  Tango crossed class lines long before politics and established an etiquette unsurpassed by any other dance.

Recent economic woes have triggered something of a renaissance of homegrown designers, chefs, and artists, as well as making it a very affordable destination. Of course, it's also attracted carpetbaggers from Texas and Napa-Sonoma looking for cheap land.  So go now before it evolves again!