Rants & Raves

October 30, 2008

Thoughts On Turning 39

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So next week, I turn 39. I have never really been a “birthday” person, at least not since I reached the age of “drinking legally, living alone, and paying confiscatory taxes.” No, those birthdays slip away each year hardly without notice.

Except for one — I always thought 30 would be a meaningful birthday, but it wasn’t. 31, however — now that meant something. It meant the beginning of something (i.e., I am now in my thirties) that was also somehow the end of something (my twenties are now long gone).

And now, a mere scant eight years later, I find myself confronted with 39, an age that I never thought amounted to anything other than unbelievable (when people say they’re 39, people think they’re really 40). It has preyed on my mind for — well, to be honest, a number of months now. It is an age that feels like the end of something but not, quite yet, the beginning of something else.

That beginning, I suppose, will come later. A year from now.

Donald Justice, who is — well, I was going to say “my favorite poet” but that would imply that I know lots of other poets, and I’m afraid I don’t. Donald Justice was a poet I discovered back in college and have held, if somewhat secretively, close — a poet unusually practical, pragmatic, and simplistically profound. He didn’t write a poem about turning 39, to my knowledge. However, he did write a poem about that age that comes one year later, and for some reason, though I cling to the twelve months I have remaining, I’ve found myself returning to this poem several times over the last few weeks.

I wish I had something profound to say myself about age, generations, birthdays, or even the small act of living long enough to turn 39. But I don’t. So here is what Donald Justice had to say about “Men at Forty.”

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

October 14, 2008

People Love Being Surprised in Comfortable Surroundings

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I have to admit it: Cynthia D’Amour has hypnotized me. It was not ever thus. When I first discovered her blog soon after she started posting, I crinkled my nose a little bit.

• What’s up with the three bullet point style of blogging?
• And the kooky pictures?
• And the little “moral” at the end of each of her posts?

So I wrote her off as kind of hokey, aiming for a target audience that didn’t include me. There’s nothing wrong with that, after all.

But then, as time went on …

• I found myself clicking on her posts in my feed reader first.
• I’d laugh a little more at each one.
• And I wanted to read the moral to see what lesson she derived for “chapter leaders,” and found many of them surprising and insightful.

Cynthia is unusual among bloggers in that she locked into a set pattern and style of blogging early on, and has been consistent ever since. The result is that with each of her posts, you know exactly what to expect, but that’s exactly what allows her to be surprising.

• Sure, she makes good points …
• But she does it in a way that’s fun and comfortable.
• She’s found the right balance between offering a consistent style that people look forward to reading, without being repetitive or boring.

Which, while I wouldn’t recommend her individual style to other bloggers (she’s cornered this particular market), is a great example for association communicators, whether they’re writing newsletters or websites or whatever. Find the tone and the pattern and the style that works for you and your audience, be consistent, and have fun, and you will be granted great freedom over what content you are allowed to cover.

In other words …

Makes me think of association communicators … do your members look forward to your insights because you offer them in a comfortable, fun and consistent way?

October 14, 2008

Unspoken Truths for Association Leaders, #14

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If someone reacts to something they don’t like by threatening to leave, you should first ensure that it was the right decision, and if it was, and they can’t be convinced of it, then allow them to do so. If someone habitually threatens to leave whenever they don’t get their way, you will be better off making the decision for them.

October 7, 2008

Gimme That Old Time Religion?

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My brief excursion into Apple fandom is officially over. I’ve had nothing but problems with their hardware recently and am transitioning back to full-on PC-dom.

My MacBook Pro gets mysteriously sluggish, has weird power things going on (it will frequently turn itself on in the middle of the night, which is kind of creepy) and I have to buy a rather expensive replacement battery because the one that came with it doesn’t exist anymore, as far as my laptop is concerned. My aluminum iMac at the office was a thing of beauty except for the fact that it crashed all the time, and it suddenly died altogether last week at an extremely inopportune time when I was in the midst of major deadlines. I didn’t have time to worry with it and immediately got a replacement Dell.

I never cared for the iPhone concept (for a touch-typist like me, the smooth touchscreen is an invitation to errors, and I like my blackberry thumb-board just fine) so that isn’t an issue for me.

But even my iPod, which is only a couple years old (but that makes it two-generations-ago ancient) has been doing strange things lately. I’ll probably replace it with another iPod, because they’re easy and basically disposable, and they are the easiest way to transport videos and music from my computer to my sound system.

The point of this mini-rant is that Apple has long had a core of faithful loyalists whose zeal for the company is near-religious, and for a while their fervor seeped out into the general marketplace. Now, even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (who apparently retired from the company in 1987, which was a really looooong time ago) says that Apple needs a correction, the iPod is fading, and the company is not served well by overly loyal customers.

Wozniak says, “With a religion you’re not allowed to challenge anything. I want our customers to challenge us.”

Well, one thing I’m always grateful for in the association world is that a lot of our members love us and what we do for them, but few of them put us on a high pedestal (and almost all of them are happy to challenge us).

Because when a customer (or member) believes that fervently in an organization, then the inevitable failures are not just lessons from which to learn, but downright disillusioning. And I’d rather have a disappointed customer than a disillusioned one. (Well, I’d rather have neither, but you get my point.)

I am not a religious person, per se. But I do believe that there are better things in which to place your faith than a manufacturer of consumer products. Or a chain of coffee shops. Or an association.

How about we all agree that people are imperfect, and make the wrong decisions as often (if not more) than the right ones, and organizations and companies are nothing but those same people trying, usually, to do the right thing. When they do something you don’t like, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re evil, and when they screw up, it doesn’t necessarily mean they can do nothing right.

And when they do something you like, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re brilliant, and when they do something that works really well, it doesn’t necessarily mean they can do no wrong.

Hey, like the song says, people are people. Seek perfection elsewhere.

As for me, it’s time to boot into Vista and shop online for a new iPod.

October 1, 2008

Stupid Tricks Salespeople Play

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David Patt has been on a tear about returning phone calls, and he’s absolutely right. But it made me think of the one kind of phone call that I almost never return: sales calls. Every day I get 20-30 voicemails and almost all of them are cold calls from salespeople. This is why it is next to impossible to get me on my direct dial. If I answered my phone every time it rang, I’d spend all day being rude to salespeople, and my karma has been damaged enough.

I have nothing against salespeople. I employ salespeople. They’re good folks. The problem is that there are some salespeople — a minority, I think — who employ such questionable tactics that they manage to tarnish all salespeople while also ensuring that their company gets less business. Here are some of the tactics that have been employed over my phone lines.

“I’m returning your call.” A couple people in our office got hit with these recently. It’s an infuriating lie. It’s the nature of our business that we make a lot of calls, and it’s always possible that we left a message for someone and don’t recall it. Calling back to receive an unexpected sales pitch means the company represented has been duly noted and will never get our business.

Keep calling different people in the organization in hopes of getting a different answer. I guess these folks must think we’re a really big organization with lots of fortress-walled cubicles. Once you’ve heard from anyone in our organization, trust me, by the time you reach someone else’s number, they’ve already got yours.

Trying to get a response by dropping the CEO’s name, or, worse, an officer or volunteer leader’s name. You think it gets you an “in” but it only ensures you remain “out.”

“I’m calling to update your contact information in our database.” We have a website. Plus, you obviously have my phone number. Plus, my voicemail message plainly states my email address (and strongly implies that it is the preferred method of communication). What more do you need?

“We spoke a year ago and you asked me to check back with you now about your needs.” No, we didn’t. Or if by some chance we did, I was probably lying to get you off the phone because I wasn’t interested.

“I’m calling to offer an exciting service or product that a mere 10-second perusal of your website would make clear that you don’t need.” ‘Nuff said.

(UPDATE: And while we’re on this subject, be sure to check out Sue Pelletier’s recent phone conversation in Bizarro world.)

September 23, 2008

The Most Important Question to Ask Any Vendor

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The most important question to ask any vendor is not, “How much do you charge?” It’s not, “How do you compare with your competitors?” It’s not, “How do you handle client relationships?” It’s not even, “What do you offer?”

Oh, those are all good questions, and they should be asked. But in my opinion the most important question to ask any vendor is:

“Are you profitable?”

I’m not talking about someone you buy one thing from or hire for some quick, short-term project. But to me, if I’m going to enter any sort of a long-term relationship, I need to feel comfortable that the vendor (no matter if it’s a big company or a one-man band) is making money and doing well and is not likely to vanish at 11:59pm tonight.

I wrote a couple years ago about how I can be a demanding customer, but I hope no one took that to mean that I’m a cheap customer. Quite the opposite. I’m perfectly willing to pay more for quality work and the comfort of knowing that a vendor is more likely than not to be here tomorrow.

There are never any guarantees, of course, and no one really knows what tomorrow will bring. (Imagine if you had a vendor you relied on that was based in downtown Houston and the impact that Ike would have had on that vendor, for example.) But it’s one thing to accept the random nature of our universe, and quite another to encourage it.

Many of the vendors we work with in the association community are private companies, and most of those don’t feel any great need to share the intricacies of their balance sheets. I don’t expect them to. (And of course, we’ve all learned by now that it’s difficult to gauge the soundness of big public companies, as well.) But while I understand the unwillingness of private firms to share their financial specifics (I would feel the same way), I hope they understand that providing some sense of their financial well-being (beyond a vague “we’re doing very well”) can be a way to secure a client who is more interested in long-term success than short-term savings.

I work with a few vendors that I worry about, because they do a fantastic job and I dread having to replace them. When I talk with them, I usually ask something like, “How’s business?” I’m not engaging in idle chitchat when I do; I want them to succeed. I want them to make money. I want them to be there tomorrow if at all possible.

Oh, and I would be very careful and very cautious before making a “big” vendor decision that involves a company that is still dependent on angel investing or that hasn’t quite yet figured out its business model. You can hire them, but assume that they could go away at any time. Like 11:59pm tonight. And be ready if they do.