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 28, 2008

Those Who Can, Do — And They’re the Ones I Want to Meet

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Hearkening back to this earlier post, and this comment conversation — and what the hey, probably has something to do with this one as well.

Here’s how we put together the workshop program for our upcoming 2009 conference:

• Developed a list of over 120 potential topics — generated from attendee suggestions last year, committees, a direct request to members, and staff
• Sent them out as a survey asking our contractor members to rate the topics, from “I would definitely go to this” down to “You couldn’t pay me to sit through this” (I’m paraphrasing)
• Broke the responses down across a couple pertinent industry segment categories
• Looked at the topics that were rated 80% or higher positive by the various segments, and …
• Went out and found people who could deliver intelligent presentations on these topics based on their experience.

Was this the easiest way to put a program together? Good God, no … far easier would have been to look at the hundreds of requests and proposals that come across my way each year from people (mostly consultants, vendors, and professional speakers) just dying to speak at our conference.

But last year was the first year we did it this way, and got a very positive response — and the initial program this year has garnered a lot of interest, with registrations outpacing last year’s at this time.

Of the workshops being offered at our conference in 2009, 76% of presenters and panelists will be contractors, and 24% consultants or vendors.

This seems about right to me. Certainly as an attendee of conferences, it’s a ratio I’m more comfortable with.

Not saying this is the way everyone should do it, it’s just an example of how one organization is doing it. But if half or more of your program presenters are primarily in the business of selling things to your members/attendees, you might want to rethink whatever way you’re doing it.

October 20, 2008

So, You’re the One On the Program, But I’m the One Expected to Provide Content?

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David Patt has been on another one of his tears about forced “interactivity” in meetings — in posts like this one, and in comments on other blogs (sometimes these feeds just all run together). I think it started with this Acronym post from an Associations Now cover article.

On this one, I am totally on David’s side.

Let me go on record as saying that I am tired of going to conference workshops where lazy … er, I mean “provocative” … presenters ask the attendees at round tables to “take 10 minutes” and speak with the random people who happened to sit at the same table with them. Maybe the presenter assigned you a “task,” and expects you to “report” after your discussion; or maybe it’s just a brief discussion period to give the presenter an opportunity to wander from table to table trolling for clients.

Whatever the stated reason, it has never been anything but a complete waste of time.

I think some of these attempts are classic examples of “learning the wrong lesson.” The lesson people think they are learning is, “Our attendees always talk about how valuable the ‘hallway track’ is, so that means they really want to just talk to each other.”

The point they are missing is that the “hallway track” is so valuable BECAUSE it happens in-between program events and in the hallway. Those stolen moments of conversation and connection are made more important by the fact that there is a program happening around them. If you just stick all your attendees in a big open hallway and tell them to have at it, then there’s a certain percentage of people who will think that’s fantastic and get a lot out of it. But there are a lot of other people (a majority, David suggests, and I suspect), who will stand around thinking, “Wow, what a waste of my time.”

So the response has been to try to bring the hallway conversations INTO the workshop. Presenters knock a good 20-30 minutes out of their presentation by inviting small group discussion in the midst of their workshop. But this satisfies no one because the people who are REALLY into the hallway track aren’t in the room (they’re in the hallway), and the people in the room are stuck listening to the one guy at their table who thinks he knows more than the presenter anyway (or has something to sell).

Now, I’m not saying that all interactivity is wrong. I’m saying it has to be CLEARLY promoted. For example, if you’re doing a workshop that’s going to be a review of a case study with different groups taking different roles, then that’s how you describe it — and people know what to expect. Or a workshop that’s clearly promoted as a “discussion” on a topic with a “discussion leader.”

But if it’s just a workshop as they are usually promoted, then the presenter should comfort herself knowing that everyone in the room is there because they think SHE is the expert and they want to hear what SHE has to say.

Finally, to those speakers who try to “break the ice” by involving the audience, a cautionary tale: at a meeting we held the week before last in Houston, a speaker tried to make a point about generations by asking a member of the audience how he got along with his parents when he was a teenager. After a long pause, the audience member said, “I don’t like to talk about my childhood.”

Um … AWK-ward.

(Oh, and that meeting the week before last in Houston? Brand-new “little” event for us, for a professional niche in our industry … sold-out crowd of more than 300 people … twice as many vendors as we expected … and other than that one awkward moment, a huge success all around. That’s just a little shout-out to all of the economic doom-criers out there.)

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 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.)