Innovate the Lean Way

“There’s no bigger waste than investing resources working on the wrong thing.”

Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate, Director, Information Systems, National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB)

Given associations’ tight resources, we can’t afford to waste time pursuing the wrong thing. Lean startup methodology (as opposed to lean six-sigma) has taken the business world by storm in the last several years, with businesses of all sizes and life stages experiencing success following its principles of building the minimum viable product, measuring what happens, and learning whether to proceed, stop, or pivot.

I’m excited to share that the newest Spark whitepaper is launching NEXT week. It’s co-authored with Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate and it applies lean startup methodology in the association sphere. Our position is that the keys to lean startup methodology – the Business Model Canvas, the Build-Measure-Learn cycle, the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and the Pivot – are just as valuable and useful to associations as to the tech startups where the concepts originated. We think this same process can be used successfully by associations, and we have the case studies to back it up!

We’ll be launching the whitepaper with a FREE webinar Wednesday, October 21 at noon ET as part of the YourMemebrship.com Thought Leader Series. Join us to learn how you can apply this technique in your own organization to eliminate waste, validate your learning, and innovate faster and more successfully.

Oh – and check back here next week to download the actual whitepaper (also free).

Are You Ready to Lead REAL Engagement?

The Spark blog has been a little quiet lately because I’ve been working on an exciting project with Anna Caraveli (The Demand Networks). Yes, the next Spark whitepaper is about to launch!

Associations have been talking a lot about engagement in the past several years, and that’s good, but we’re mostly still not doing a great job of actually nurturing real member engagement.

Anna and I think that’s because we’ve been going about engagement all wrong, putting ourselves and the association’s needs at the center of what engagement means, rather than viewing the members (and other audiences) and what they’re trying to accomplish as the heart of engagement.

So we wrote a whitepaper about it that features stories from ELEVEN different organizations who’ve cracked the code of generating engagement by being engaging and shares EIGHT keys to becoming engaging that we discovered through our research.

Intrigued? Join us for the official release webinar, next Wednesday, May 20, as part of the YourMembership.com Thought Leaders series.

Oh – and check back here next week to download the actual whitepaper (also free).