Top Takes: Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru

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Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of democratic India. His daughter was Indira Gandhi, the woman who succeeded him as prime minister and was eventually assassinated. But as the pages of this remarkable book open, those things haven’t happened yet. The book is a collection of letters, written in 1931-33, when Indira was between 14 and 16 years old, and her father was serving time as a political prisoner.

Partly to help keep his mind active and partly to help his daughter develop an appropriate appreciation for world history, Nehru wrote these letters without notes or other reference materials, relying primarily on his own knowledge and beliefs of what had created and shaped the world around him -- thousands of years of history, from the beginnings of civilization, to the aftermath of the First World War and the initial stirrings of the Second.

And throughout all the letters in this long book, I think it is important to remember that, whatever the reader’s own political and economic beliefs, the words he is reading are the simple and straightforward prose of a loving father writing to his daughter.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: The Stranger by Albert Camus

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the thirteenth most pageviews on this entire blog:

The Stranger by Albert Camus

It's one of the many "mini term papers" I tend to offer up, free of charge, to desperate freshman English majors the world over.

The Stranger is not a novel that turns on characters or plot. It turns, rather, on ideas, indeed, the one powerful idea of our own death that we must all come to terms with if we ever hope to transcend it, to act in opposition to the patterns of thought and behavior that keeps us a stranger to ourselves. Even though that realization only makes us a stranger to the rest of humankind.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: 4DX Is Harder Than It Reads

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4DX Is Harder Than It Reads

Here, I report on my progress in trying to implement something like "The 4 Disciplines of Execution" in my own organization.

I've previously described "4DX" as a deceptively simple and oddly compelling system for achieving an organization's wildly important goals. But, as I begin to detail in this blog post, putting its concepts into practice is somewhat more difficult. And that difficulty starts at the very beginning, in the process of trying to decide what your organization's wildly important goals are.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the eleventh most pageviews on this entire blog:

The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

This is a marvelous little book that uses four different narrators to explore the dark and painful repercussions that come with the loss of innocence. On the surface, the innocence in question is the lives of fourteen children from a small town called Sam Dent, who are killed in a school bus accident, but roiling away under the surface are the irrevocable thoughts and fears of our four narrators.

The four narrators come to represent a set of competing philosophies -- ranging from apathetic fatalism to domineering determinism -- but in the end we come to see that only one of them is able to dimly discern the truth of what has happened. And from that viewpoint we find the bitter and painful lesson that those who are to blame for tragedy rarely, if ever, get what's coming to them.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: Moving the Goal Posts

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the tenth most pageviews on this entire blog:

Moving the Goal Posts

In it, I talk about the situations in which "moving the goal posts," that is, changing the metrics by which the success of a program or strategic initiative is determined, is necessary.

These situations are marked, I've found, by the need for the association to learn more about the environment it is entering before it can successfully identify the true markers of success. In other words, you leap into an external environment with one understanding of what is needed, necessarily calibrating the program defining/metric tracking piece of your operation with that understanding, only to discover that, once you are in the thick of implementing those plans, that different tactics, and sometimes, a different strategy, are needed in order to achieve success.

It is not for the faint of heart. But, in these situations, keeping the goal posts where they are means turning what might be your organization's greatest endeavor into a make-work exercise.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

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A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

Written in 1955, this is both a detailed accounting of the sinking of the Titanic and, much more interestingly for me, and reflective essay on the death of one set of cultural norms, a way of life that had already been losing traction, but which lost all its footing in the wake of the disaster.

Lord beautifully describes how a cultural preoccupation with wealth quickly became a casualty of the Titanic disaster. To fully understand this, to understand the world as it now exists, it is often helpful to first understand the world as it used to be.

It was easier in the old days … for the Titanic was also the last stand of wealth and society in the center of public affection. In 1912 there were no movie, radio or television stars; sports figures were still beyond the pale; and cafe society was completely unknown. The public depended on socially prominent people for all the vicarious glamour that enriches drab lives.

This preoccupation was fully appreciated by the press. When the Titanic sailed, the New York Times listed the prominent passengers on the front page. After she sank, the New York American broke the news on April 16 with a lead devoted almost entirely to John Jacob Astor; at the end it mentioned that 1,800 others were also lost.

In the same mood, the April 18 New York Sun covered the insurance angle of the disaster. Most of the story concerned Mrs. Widener’s pearls.

Never again did established wealth occupy people’s minds so thoroughly. On the other hand, never again was wealth so spectacular. John Jacob Astor thought nothing of shelling out 800 dollars for a lace jacket some dealer displayed on deck when the Titanic stopped briefly at Queenstown. To the Ryersons there was nothing unusual about traveling with 16 trunks. The 190 families in First Class were attended by 23 handmaids, eight valets, and assorted nurses and governesses--entirely apart from hundreds of stewards and stewardesses. These personal servants had their own lounge on C Deck, so that no one need suffer the embarrassment of striking up a conversation with some handsome stranger, only to find he was Henry Sleeper Harper’s dragoman.

This was truly not just another time, but another world.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: Moral Politics by George Lakoff

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Moral Politics by George Lakoff

In this book the author presents a theory about how political liberals and conservatives think; a theory that basically has two parts. One, people’s political attitudes are driven by their underlying morality and, in America, there are two basic moral frameworks at play, both arising out of different view of the family.

Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model [of the family], while liberalism is centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different choices of words and different modes of reasoning.

And two, these family-based moral systems are relevant to political opinions because of the widespread view of the Nation through the metaphor of a family.

The link between family-based morality and politics comes from one of the most common ways we have of conceptualizing what a nation is, namely, as a family. It is the common, unconscious, and automatic metaphor of the Nation-as-Family that produces contemporary conservatism from Strict Father morality and contemporary liberalism from Nurturant Parent morality.

It's a fascinating read, with a lot of unexpected twists and turns along the way, especially when Lakoff attempts to argue for one of the two moral systems are the "right" way to approach political questions. But beware the false equivalency embedded in his approach. Since the Nation-As-Family metaphor is, at best, an approximation of reality, it's not fair to condemn one moral system because it more frequently fails in raising well-adjusted children.

To wit, Strict Father morality may be a horrible way to raise children. But is it a horrible way of running a country?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: The Chief Detail Officer

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The Chief Detail Officer

In a linked TED talk, Rory Sutherland persuasively makes the case that organizations don't spend enough time working on the small stuff. That, in fact, there is a bias in most organizations that big problems have to be met with big solutions--solutions that have to be conceptualized by powerful people and executed with lots and lots of money.

Sutherland doesn't claim that approach won't work in some situations, but he comes out stridently for a different approach, embodied by something he calls the Chief Detail Officer, the CDO. This isn't the person responsible for coordinating all the details. It is the person responsible for finding small things that cost little that have tremendous impact and making sure they are done right and consistently.

I've seen the need for such an approach myself, and can cite at least one circumstance when some small detail meant a great deal to one of my association members.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

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All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

It's one of the many "mini term papers" I tend to offer up, free of charge, to desperate freshman English majors the world over.

My overall theses: This is a story of a boy becoming a man, and the changes he has to go through in order to make that transformation. The boy is named John Grady, and there is an exchange between him and a criminal in a Mexican prison that pretty well describes the difference between boys and men,

Where did you learn to fight? he said.

John Grady took a deep pull on the cigarette and leaned back.

What do you want to know? he said.

Only what the world wants to know.

What does the world want to know.

The world wants to know if you have cojones. If you are brave.

And that’s the essence. The world does not often test the bravery of a young boy. But as he grows and begins to make his way in it, it will test him, and if the boy passes the test, he will no longer be a boy. Regardless of his age—and John Grady is sixteen—if he can stand up to world and hold his own, he is a man.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the fifth most pageviews on this entire blog:

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

It's one of the many "mini term papers" I tend to offer up, free of charge, to desperate freshman English majors the world over.

My overall theses: This is a play about the balance between order and freedom, and specifically order’s ultimate triumph over its weaker counterbalance.

The historical setting is, of course, the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. The order is that of the theocratic state, its functionaries able to convict, jail and hang those they determine to be in league with the Devil. The freedom is that of John Proctor, his wife Elizabeth, and their fellow villagers, who are held hostage by the accusations of a group of vengeful teenage girls.

It may seem silly to our modern sensibilities, but these people very much believed in God and the Devil, and the way the two of them battled for people’s souls right here on earth. And Miller paints no one in his drama as a fool, just as people with clashing motivations interpreting the world as they understand it.

It's a great play.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: Membership Sales Is About More Than Just Increasing Membership Numbers

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the fourth most pageviews on this entire blog:

Membership Sales Is About More Than Just Increasing Membership Numbers

It makes the point that selling is always about interacting with the market, and adjusting what you're saying about what you're selling (and sometimes adjusting what you're selling) based on that interaction.

Specific to associations, statements of membership value become most effective when they are tested and developed in discussion with real members and membership prospects. Crafting all your marketing copy in the office and launching it untested on the world is one of the best ways to get it wrong.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: The Chairman's Gift

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The Chairman's Gift

It's about a tradition we have at our association, where we give the outgoing chair of the Board a gift unique and meaningful to them. We do it because we value our chairs for the humans they are, but also to send a clear message to everyone else on the Board and at the retreat where the gift is usually bestowed.

Our association is a family, and we care about each other in ways that go beyond financial reports, strategic objectives, and key performance indicators.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: The 4 Disciplines of Execution

Take another look at the post that, as of this writing, has the second most pageviews on this entire blog:

The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling

It's my take on a book with the subtitle of “Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals,” something the authors refer to as WIGs. In the overall, it describes a deceptively simple and oddly compelling system for achieving them. They call it 4DX, short for the Four Disciplines of Execution, and they are:

1. Focus on the Wildly Important
2. Act on the Lead Measures
3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability

Lots of great content in the post, even a theoretical application of these disciplines to my own organization.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Top Takes: Stop Calling It Strategic Planning

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Stop Calling It Strategic Planning

I stand by it. Whatever you choose to call it, to be effective, associations need a methodology to accomplish the following five things:

1. They need a mission that everyone can support, that defines why they exist, and around which they will dedicate their resources and activity.

2. They need a vision for the future, a single or set of envisioned states of being, that inspires people and keeps them stretching to achieve more than they might have thought possible.

3. They need to develop a set of programs that are clearly aligned with their mission and which are capable of moving them towards their vision. These programs should both serve the interests of their members and engage them in the process of their development and execution.

4. They need to develop and employ the appropriate resources so that the programs have the best chance of success.

5. They need to monitor the progress of the programs and evaluate their impact on their mission and their ability to move them closer to their vision. They must make adjustments based on this evaluation, striving for a cycle of continuous improvement.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.