On the anniversary of the first moon landing, Jeff De Cagna wonders if associations (and the rest of society) have lost our ability to imagine the impossible. It’s a good question. But I would like to delve a little deeper into it.
Q: Why did America go to the moon?
A: To beat the Soviets there.
(See Wikipedia’s entry on the space race for more.)
Going to the moon wasn’t a bold idea for its own sake. It wasn’t a grand vision undertaken for altruistic reasons. The leadership that made the development and implementation of the technology possible stemmed from a desire to crush the competition.
To bring this down to your association, in your industry or profession or whatever …
In my opinion, if an association wants to truly break through, wants to achieve the impossible …
It has to know what its competition is. And it has to want to crush it.
This is not a topic that many associations are comfortable with. We’re collaborators; we’re partners; and all too often, associations define the idea of “competition” so narrowly that we miss the real competitors entirely.
I’ve been amazed at how many association execs have told me in conversation, “We don’t really have any competitors.” Yes, you do.
They’re not always the sorts of companies and organizations that you might have traditionally defined as a competitor. In fact, in many cases today, your competition might not be a “thing” at all. It might be political interests aligned against yours. It might be online communities or whatnot. It may be dangerous societal trends. It might be a segment of your audience that wants things to go a certain way that will hurt others, or that want to fight change that will help all over time.
Whatever it is, it’s still competition. You still need to know what it is, understand it, and commit to beating it — in my opinion, by going beyond it. By providing something so much better, so much more “impossible,” so much more important and useful to your market that the competition, whatever it is, is left light years behind. It means doing something different from whatever it is you’re doing right now.
This is how you go to the moon.
Jeff says, ”Leaders will aspire to make real that which does not yet exist. Everyone else will share all the reasons why those things can’t be done. ” I think he’s absolutely right. But we have to remember that leaders need a reason to make it real, just like JFK did. In the rough-and-tumble real world, that means they need to understand what forces are aligned against them — and they have to want to crush those forces.
The wanting is the important part. Without it, we’ll just pay lip service. We won’t really commit. There are too many priorities fighting for our attention, too much shifting sand and too many different agendas changing year to year.
No, to achieve the impossible, leaders have to really want to beat the communists. So to speak.
{ 9 comments }
You are dead on here. Some days, I think that US society has decided that winning is a bad thing, except for college or professional sports. Ask yourself, does your organization (your board, your employees) want to win? Or, are you spending all your energy and intellectual capital trying to co-exist?
Joseph Schumpeter spoke of “creative destruction” over 60 years ago. This is exactly what you’re describing when you write of “crushing” the competition. By becoming better we’ll “destroy” that which is not as good, thus raising the level of quality of everything around us. As Schumpeter wrote, this is the heart of capitalism. As you point out, Kevin, I think many association executives are uncomfortable with this.
I think an important distinction is necessary here, in that crushing competition by being better than the competition is different than crushing it by debilitating it.
Let’s take the really easy example of an association that finds an unofficial Facebook group. The best way to crush that “competition” would be to create either an official Facebook group or a networking site hosted in-house that has better content, better discussions, better networking opportunities, etc. So much better that everyone in the unofficial group leaves it and joins yours (b/c you’ve reached out and invited them, of course). Conversely, the knee-jerk reaction might be to debilitate the unofficial group by attacking it, suing it for illegal use of your logo, etc.
These are two very different approaches, but both might be understood as crushing the competition. The point you and Jeff have made by referring to the space race is important, and as Wes points out, wanting to be so great that you beat the competition is what makes capitalism work so well. Associations, however, often seem to act like monopolies that just work to preserve their market dominance, not their high quality.
Joe, “crush the competition” is a fun phrase — I like the sound of the word “crush.” But all I really mean is “winning,” not necessarily hacking your competitors into pieces and throwing them into the harbor. Also I’m not a big fan of monopolies, big or small (because I like competition so much), so I think you make an excellent point about the tendency of some organizations to be interested more in “preserving market dominance” than in actually producing spectacular results. In my mind, simply acting to eliminate competitors is not really beating them.
I would also reiterate the importance of knowing who and what your competitors really are. In regards to your Facebook analogy, the proper response of many associations may be to recognize that the unofficial group is not a competitor at all. (Now, if you view yourself only as a “group of people who do or like or are interested in X” then maybe they would be a competitor — but so are about a million other things and frankly, I think you’re doomed. If you focus on on offering “better” discussions, “better” content, “better” networking opportunities, then you’re just trying to beat your competiton by offering the same thing they do and/or “improving” whatever it is you’re doing right now. Not gonna get you to the moon, in my opinion.)
Thanks Kevin. That’s a good point about the Facebook group analogy. Indeed, cooperating and welcoming them to your sphere— “absorbing” them, perhaps—would likely often be the best route.
To the broader point, though, I definitely understand how associations have trouble defining who or what their competitors are. I struggle with that line of thought often myself. And it makes sense that when your competition is hard to define it’s easy to become complacent. Your example of the space race illustrates that perfectly. The Soviet Union was a plain and obvious competitor, and that spurred American innovation. But in the past 20 years, without that direct, tangible, identifiable competition, American innovation flagged somewhat as we grew complacent as a country. But I digress.
Your point is well taken about how just doing the same thing better won’t get you to the moon. I agree, that which is innovative, new, and different is a much better form of “better.” (It’s probably more fun, too.)
Thanks for this very good post. By the way, like it or not, I think the competition for associations is getting stronger. I just wrote about the for profit movement into the association arena with my post, “A Wake-Up Call for Associations”: http://membershipmarketing.blogspot.com/2009/07/wake-up-call-for-assoc iations.html
Tony
Thanks, Doug, Wes, Tony, and Joe —
Joe, to your point about the lack of a clear competitor and its impact on American society over the last couple of decades, I completely agree, but that’s a discussion for another time. Suffice to say that both Bush I and Bush II announced plans for a mission to Mars but the idea was met with a collective yawn and, in my opinion, for good reason: they bought into the hype that JFK inspired the nation with a vision of reaching the moon, when in fact he inspired the nation with a vision of beating the Russians. Minus the need to best a global competitor in a fight for national prestige, a transcendent mission to extend mankind’s reach further into the universe is just one priority jockeying for position amongst many.
Doug, I like your use of the word “co-exist.” This does seem to be the height of some organization’s aspirations. Mind you, I’m not saying that co-existence, or partnership, is always a bad thing; often it’s a very good thing. (For example, in a situation where you have two different associations, serving the exact same market, doing very similar things, the best thing MIGHT be to combine forces so that you are better positioned to deal with the REAL competition out there.) But it’s not ALWAYS the right thing, even when it’s the easiest thing.
Just read ‘The Right Stuff’ which does put the whole moon shot effort into a context we seem to have forgotten. As one of my professors used to say a lot in grad school, “Nothing makes for a better ‘We’ than a good ‘They’!”
Ha! Love that quote, David.
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