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Getting Lean
Is it just me, or is lean process trending? I recently read a great Harvard Business Review article on the lean startup. According to HBR, lean: …favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition,…
Read More →Association Alumni Networks
I was recently reading an article in Harvard Business Review on the changing employer-employee relationship. The main point of the article, to quote, is: The time has come, we [authors Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and…
Read More →The Looming Retirement Crisis
No, I don’t mean the typical “Boomers haven’t saved enough!” wailing, although that’s certainly likely to be a problem. I mean the hourglass problem. As in, there are somewhere between 72-79 million Baby Boomers, and…
Read More →Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
The presentation Peggy Hoffman, Eric Lanke, and I recently gave at ASAE’s Marketing, Membership and Communications Conference on volunteer engagement was about learning to manage volunteers by being a volunteer, aka “Walking a Mile in…
Read More →Do You SAVE?
First, marketing had the 4 Ps: Product, aka what you’re selling Price, aka what it costs Placement, aka how do you get your product to your customers Promotion, aka how are you selling your product…
Read More →Learning to Take Critcism
This is a tough one, right? Criticism happens to all of us, whether it’s in the form of evaluations after a presentation, the official annual review, unofficial feedback from a boss or colleagues, or editorial…
Read More →The Consultant and the Association Exec Should Be Friends
Eons ago (actual time: four years), I wrote two blog posts on the topic of consulting and RFPs. They’re still among my most popular posts ever. I got thinking about this topic again recently for…
Read More →Novelty for Novelty’s Sake
As associations, we have to be wary of “we have always done it that way.” And if you read this blog regularly, you know that I rail against unwillingness to change pretty frequently. I would…
Read More →Is It Time for a New Model of Membership?
I recently spoke on this topic as part of the April Alexandria Brown Bag focusing on Grassroots Membership Strategies, where I shared the story of my fab client the American Medical Student Association. About a…
Read More →AMS, CRM, and “So Now What?”
This is the final post of launch week for the new Spark whitepaper, Member Relations: An Association-Centric Approach to Customer Relationship Management: We’ve looked at CRM as an approach, CRM as software, how AMS and…
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