Nice quote from an article in Associations Now about paradoxes:
“Businesses and associations today need to embrace change and live with paradox. They have to admit to themselves that the same old, same old won’t do. And they may not just have to think outside the box; they may have to throw away the box altogether. Bottom line: Paradoxes abound, and I believe they should be explored and embraced, not ignored.”
Thanks to Scott Briscoe for “borrowing” one of the ideas from our book in his recent “idea a day” series of posts over at the Acronym blog. He cited the “beta publishing” post from this blog that talks about releasing versions of publications before they are completely finished (which wasn’t our idea”â€we borrowed it too). In fact, we beta published our book at last year’s Great Ideas conference.
This year, all Five Independent Thinkers will once again be at the Great Ideas Conference in Marco Island, Florida, later this month (now’s the chance to get your book signed!). Actually, in addition to being listed at Amazon in the UK, our book will now be offered for sale at the ASAE bookstore, starting in Marco Island (thanks ASAE & The Center!). We are going to try to arrange a signing in conjunction with that, so come see us.
In case you thought the “always done it that way” phenomenon was limited to associations, think again. As the CEO of a Swiss pharmaceutical company writes in this month’s HBR:
“Sometimes, the resistance takes form of unquestioned assumptions. In the mid-1990s, when I was with another company, we had an ulcer treatment that had reached $1 billion in sales–which was as much as any pharmaceutical prodcut had ever sold. I believed sales could go twice as high, but convincing the marketing teams and general managers around the world was a huge challenge. The whole organization was absolutely convinced it couldn’t be done. Why? Simply because it hadn’t been done before.”
Our book version of this site has finally hit Books in Print and is beginning to show up in online stores other than Lulu. Oddly enought, it is now available on Amazon.co.uk but not the US version yet. You can still purchase copies via Lulu as well. Buy one for each of your friends!
This story in the Washington Post provides a tragic and inspiring example of change: A Crash’s Improbable Impact. The story is about how the crash of Air Florida on a DC bridge in 1982 illuminated how communicating as they always had in the cockpit decreased the safety of the flights. It then led to dramatic change in how pilots, ship captains and even surgeons interact with their crews. Here is an excerpt:
As experts and airline executives digested the safety board’s report, they began to more closely scrutinize other problems in the cockpit that day. It emerged that Pettit and Wheaton were emblematic of aviation’s lingering cowboy culture, a residue of an era when fighter jocks from World War II and Korea flew for the airlines. In that gung-ho environment, captains were always right. They did not need advice, and co-pilots and other crew members often were afraid to assert themselves.
“It was a more romantic time frame when aviation, wasn’t just a transportation system, but that needed to change,” said Larry Rockliff, vice president of training for Airbus North America.
William Taylor, founder of Fast Company magazine (and speaker at last year’s ASAE & The Center Annual Meeting) has an article in the Volunteer Leadership Issue in Associations Now. His recent book is about “Maverick” organizations, so it’s no surprise that much of his message resonates with what we’ve written here at
He makes one point, though, that I think is important both for the “disruptors” he’s talking about in his article and for people who want to start doing things differently in associations, as we’re advocating in the book. And that point is that the smartest disruptors behave like diplomats.
“There is a difference between championing a distinctive point of view and inviting retribution from inside or outside your organization”¦. ‘What I learned so viscerally at Netscape,’ [Netscape's founder Michael McCue] says, ‘”¦is that you have to be willing to slow down in order to build the organization properly. If you grow too fast, if you try to do too much too soon, it backfires. Being a disruptor means being patient.’”
You may not be able to apply some of the ideas in our book overnight. If your association’s
Many thanks to association blogger extraordinaire Ben Martin for bestowing the “most buzzed and blogworthy thing to happen in 2006″Â award to our humble book! I also received mention in Ben’s annual post, as did fellow author Jeff. I’m glad we’re holding our own in the blogoclump!
And our book also played a role in Ben’s “worst comment” award. It is quite amusing, actually. Ben wrote a very interesting post on the Acronym blog that talked about the merits of having both our book and ASAE’s Seven Measures of Success report as required reading for the CAE program, even though the two documents are quite different.
Jeff posted a response comment thanking Ben, and then someone from the CAE commission posted what appears to be an entire form letter as a comment. It cites the CAE mission statement and goes on for five paragraphs, but I think the only actual message in the comment was, “Thanks for suggesting these two books.”Â
The Blogoclump