Dragons - Chapter 14 (DRAFT)

It took me a few days to coordinate everyone’s schedules, but I was eventually able to bring the department heads together to begin what we would come to call the Staff Qualities Project.

Now, when I say department heads I mean the folks who had overall responsibility for each of the company’s functional units—Communications, Human Resources, Information Technology—things like that. Getting them all together was more difficult than it may sound, because in the complicated hierarchy of the company, some of the ‘heads’ reported to me and some of them didn’t.

The company had twenty or so clients back then, and either Mary or Don personally served as the account executive for each of them, unwilling to relinquish that kind of control to anyone else. Most of the clients were fairly small, and could easily be managed in just a few hours a week, but one of Mary’s clients was huge, with far more programs than any of the others. To help her with this burden, she had created a deputy executive role for that client—the only one like it in the company—and that was the job I had recently been promoted to. With this structure it wasn’t clear whether the department heads were above, below, or at my level as the only deputy exec. And it didn’t help that some of the heads actually reported to me, but most of them reported directly to either Mary or Don.

Look, if you want me to I can draw a map of all the solid and dashed lines that made up our stupid organizational chart. In all the years I worked there, I was never able to explain this to someone and have it make sense to them on the first try. I always felt like I needed to provide one of those character maps that accompanied some of Shakespeare’s political tragedies—you know, something you could refer back to when cousins, stepbrothers, and adopted sons started bumping each other off to keep clear on who was next in line for the throne. But for our purposes it’s probably not critical that you understand all these connections in detail. Suffice it to say this was not a group of people I could bring together on a moment’s notice. Although I had been put in charge of the project, I wasn’t in a position to just call a meeting and get it going. In many cases I had to ask politely and drop Mary’s name in order to get a commitment to attend.

The group I was finally able to assemble comprised seven individuals—eight, including myself. There would have been nine of us if we had come together before Susan’s resignation, but by then I was already wearing Susan’s hat as well as mine. Three of these folks I’ve already mentioned. Peggy Wilcox was there as our director of Human Resources, as was Bethany Bishop and Gerald Krieger, the two people I described trading timesheet war stories with back when Mary first took over the company. Oh, and one other person I guess I mentioned before, but not by name. That would be Scott Nelson, the guy they tapped to take over the Accounting department after Mary moved from there to the President’s office. The three other people were Jurgis Pavlov, the cadaverous Russian immigrant who ran our IT department, Angie Ferguson, a hard-nosed and bullet-shaped woman who negotiated all our vendor contracts, and Michael Lopez, who headed up our Communications department.

If ever there was a project designed with Michael Lopez in mind, it had to be the Staff Qualities. He was a young guy—like a lot of us, not yet forty—athletic and hungry. He had worked for some big clients at a couple of PR agencies before coming to us. He was good at what he did, and he knew it. Somewhere in between workouts he had gotten an MBA—something that had endeared him to Mary, who loved nothing more than a staff with a bunch of little initials after their names. Michael had a knack for branding, a good eye for design, and wrote by far the best ad copy of anyone in the company. He could sell you your own shoes and you’d walk away feeling that you’d gotten him to give you the best possible price. But what he did best, the strength he really brought to this project, was his ability to brainstorm.

Gerald had another word for it. It also began with a B.

“Alan,” he had told me when I had invited him to come to the meeting. “If this is another one of those make-work projects that gives Michael a platform from which to spew his bullshit, so help me…”

I sympathized. Brainstorming was like a drug to Michael, and like a ballplayer doped up on steroids, when ideas started getting bandied about the imitation mahogany table, he’d wind up taking bigger and bigger risks, talking more and more out of his ass, looking for that elusive prize that would allow him to both solve the problem and take all the credit for it.

“No, this is serious,” I had told Gerald, choosing to address his concern about make-work rather than promising to rein Michael in. “Mary wants us to come up with a draft. It has to be in place before we start hiring to fill Susan’s position.”

Secretly, I was happy Michael had so readily agreed. In the days it had taken me to get the group together I had spent some time thinking about what Mary had asked me to do, and despite Jenny’s pessimism about it, I had come to see it as a real opportunity to make some positive change in the organization. I was still upset over the way Susan had been treated, feeling that her supportive and inclusive management style was something the company desperately needed. If we could somehow define that as the standard for the organization, and then begin hiring people based on that standard, I thought we might actually have an impact on the company’s miserable and soul-crushing culture. And although I had a clear understanding of what I wanted to do, even as we assembled in the conference room for our first meeting, I wasn’t sure how much of that I should reveal to the department heads, or how we were possibly going to get there.

But Michael was quick to volunteer an idea.

“Why don’t we just start listing off all the attributes we think are necessary for success in the company?”

“What?” I asked.

“Sure,” Michael said. “We’ve all worked here long enough to know the kind of people we’re looking for. Let’s just start throwing out some ideas. We can edit them later.”

I looked around and tried to quickly assess everyone’s initial reaction to the idea. They had greeted me with a whole lot of silence after I had introduced our task a few minutes before, so I was hopeful that Michael’s suggestion would be accepted as a way of getting the discussion flowing. Gerald, of course, was feeding me a scowl, but I judged that everyone else appeared either willing or indifferent to the proposal.

“Come on,” Michael said, getting out of his padded chair and taking up a position beside the flipchart standing like an unknown soldier in the corner of the room. “I’ll get it started.” He uncapped one of the markers and quickly began writing across the top of the paper. “A successful staff person is someone who…” he said as he wrote, pausing a moment to underline the title and placing a bullet point before his first contribution, “…shows initiative.”

Michael turned back to the group, the anticipatory twinkle of his next fix already in his eye. “Who’s next?” His dress shirt was open one button past the collar and I could see the slim gold chain he wore around his neck. “Bethany, how about you? When you think about the qualities of a successful staff person, what comes to mind?”

We all turned our attention towards Bethany, someone I thought Michael had correctly perceived as more enthusiastic than apathetic.

“Ummm…” she said, crinkling her misshapen nose and biting her lower lip, looking like a child trying to decide which flavored toothpaste to get at the dentist. “…supports the mission of the organization?”

She sounded uncertain but Michael accepted it readily. “Good,” he said, writing her idea quickly on the flipchart. “What else?”

“Completes assignments on time,” Angie said, as usual, her voice just a little louder than it needed to be.

Michael nodded, his marker squeaking its way across the paper.

Several more ideas came in quick succession. Jurgis thought the ideal staff person should be able to “solve problems.” Peggy thought they should be a “team player.” The momentum was starting to build and I decided it was safe for me to contribute an idea of my own—something I hoped would start steering us in the direction I wanted to go.

“Thinks creatively,” I said, oddly satisfied to see several approving nods from around the table. Bethany especially beamed at me, as if I had read her very mind.

“Excellent,” Michael said, as he worked to stay with the flow. “Let’s keep it going. What else?”

But despite this encouragement, a sudden silence filled the room.

“Come on, now,” Michael said, turning to face us with his eyes darting about like a quarterback in a huddle. “Who hasn’t said something yet? Gerald, how about you? A successful staff person is someone who…”

“…kisses Mary’s ass.”

It was like hitting a brick wall at sixty miles an hour. Gerald’s hostile tone was startling, but not as much as the way everyone else in the room shut down and turned guardedly toward me. If I’d thought I could let Michael run this meeting, I’d just discovered my mistake.

“Gerald,” I said. “Come on, be serious.”

“I am serious, Alan. With all the other tripe you’re putting up there, you might as well just cut to the chase and save us a lot of time.”

“Gerald,” Michael said, his muscles twitching nervously under his shirt. “We’re brainstorming. You’re not supposed to criticize other ideas when brainstorming.”

Gerald ignored Michael’s reprimand. “Look, Alan,” he said, speaking to me as if he and I were the only two people in the room, “you told me this wasn’t going to be another make-work exercise. Exactly what is it you think we can accomplish with this?”

Gerald was being less hostile, but his question was still a direct threat. Everyone knew he was a kind of lone wolf, notorious for his boldness and his ability to get away with things no one else could—like not showing up for meetings unless he thought they were worth his time. The last thing I needed was to have him openly boycotting this process.

“I thought I stated that fairly clearly at the beginning of the meeting,” I said assertively, not trying to intimidate him, but at least hold my own in the eyes of the others. “We need to identify the qualities most associated with success in the company.”

“Why?”

Because Mary wants us to. That was the response that came immediately to my mind, but I chomped it back, knowing instinctively it wouldn’t serve my purpose. Mary was the club I had used to bring this group together—her desire to see this project done—but I had to be careful not to tie Mary too closely to our effort. No one liked Mary. That was universal. But most people in the company were also afraid of her, including, I knew, several of those sitting around our table. If I wanted them to help me re-invent the company’s culture, I had to keep Mary’s name out of this as much as possible. In a way, I knew Gerald was right. No one was going to contribute any revolutionary ideas as long as her spirit was floating over us.

But right now I had a bigger issue to deal with. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see everyone looking at me skeptically, like a pack of young dogs eyeing the aging alpha male, curious to see how I was going to handle Gerald’s open defiance.

“Because we’ll use those qualities to help us screen new candidates for employment,” I told him calmly, and then I said, “Look,” with sudden passion, using my body language to dismiss Gerald and reach out to all the others around the table. “Don’t you see what a tremendous opportunity this is? Let’s assume we are able to come up with this list of traits, these qualities that define the ideal staff person for the company. It doesn’t have to be a list that describes any existing individual. I’m not looking to enshrine anyone who currently works here as the model we should all aspire to. It’ll be an amalgam of all the best traits of all the best people who have worked here over the years. Once we have that list in hand, HR can start using it to screen applicants. The people they hire will by definition be closer to that ideal standard than they have been before.”

I glanced over at Peggy at the mention of her department and was rewarded with a motherly nod. Encouraged, I went on with even more excitement. “And what if we all start using the same list to conduct our personnel evaluations? Those who strive to embody the traits will be rewarded. Bit by bit, hire by hire, evaluation by evaluation—we’ll start affecting the very culture of this organization, transforming it into something better aligned for success.”

I waited, looking anxiously from face to face, trying to determine who was with me and who wasn’t. Some folks liked working there, but most didn’t—and I was gambling that the majority would be willing to try and change things if they could.

“It sounds great, Alan,” Gerald said softly, tipping himself back in his chair and studying me through the lenses of his designer eyeglasses. “It really does. But what about Mary?”

Like a flash I knew I had to tackle this head on. “What about her?” I shot back, before the mention of her name could suck all the energy out of the room.

“Is she on board with all of this?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?” I said. “She asked me to lead the project, didn’t she? If we do this right, all we’re going to do is make her company more successful and more competitive. Why would she be opposed to that?”

There was a long silence as Gerald and I sat looking at each other, broken only by the sound of Michael repeatedly removing the cap of the flipchart marker and snapping it back into place. The pause gave me ample opportunity to replay the words I had just spoken in my mind and wonder where the hell they had come from. Did Gerald just do that to me? Did he just maneuver me into making a promise only Mary could deliver on? I did the best I could to keep the doubt I was feeling out of the expression on my face, knowing that Gerald and I were playing a kind of chicken and the one who looked less sure of himself was going to lose.

“Well, I’m in,” Bethany said suddenly, and when I turned towards her I found her eyes looking at me warmly. “Let’s give it a shot.”

“Me, too,” Michael quickly added, still standing in the corner and looking a little disappointed that he hadn’t had anything to write down in the last few minutes.

I looked at some of the other faces in the room. I knew I hadn’t won yet. Any one of them could sink me by splashing cold water on the project the way Gerald had. But if they were all willing to follow me, then maybe together we could convince Gerald to play nice.

“Scott, what about you?” I asked, thinking he was the biggest wild card of those who remained uncommitted. He was a quiet one around the office—small and slight and almost certainly closeted. But as Mary’s hand-picked successor as the head of the Accounting department, it was generally assumed he did most of his talking in Mary’s office, reporting back on almost everything he heard. As usual, he hadn’t yet said a word in our meeting.

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “Let’s see where this thing goes.”

“Angie?”

“Count me in.”

“Peggy?” My heart quavered just a bit as I realized she was even more a direct line back to Don as Scott was thought to be to Mary.

“I love this idea.”

“Jurgis?”

“Da.”

I turned back to Gerald, a smile tickling the corners of my lips, no longer fearing the inside straight he was trying to build because I had a full house arrayed against him. He was still tipped back in his chair, his fingers steepled in front of his face. In a moment, he allowed his chair to fall forward and he placed his elbows confidently on the table.

“Okay,” he said. “But if we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it right.”

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

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.

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Participation Tracking Is Not for the Faint of Heart

We track our members. We don't use face recognition software, metadata, or complicated algorithms. We use an even more diabolical mechanism. Microsoft Excel.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about the sometimes difficult work of maintaining a member participation tracking system in your association. A way of knowing how many and which programs or activities each member is participating in. When done consistently, it provides invaluable information about which members are engaged and which are not, which members are likely to renew and which are not, and which members you should be seeking to engage and which you should not.

I had a meeting this past week where we took a fresh look at our system. It's a surprisingly complicated engine and it was probably due for a tune-up, so the meeting was a good use of our time. As we went through the many dozens of details, I was struck (again) by a really important decision we had to make in setting the system up.

As I said above, the purpose of our tracking system is to understand which members are likely to renew their membership and which members are not. The implied correlation is therefore that participating in programs is aligned with a member's likelihood to renew. Those members that engage in few or no programs are at a heightened risk for non-renewal, and therefore warrant additional attention and marketing from the association.

That, I hope, is pretty straightforward. It's an assumption, but a reasonable one from where I sit. But the next decision is often fraught with difficulties. Given that the goal is to predict which members may or may not renew, which programs should you track? All of them? Or just those that are highly correlated with member satisfaction and a member's likelihood to renew?

Our answer is the latter, and that's one of the things we did in our recent tune-up meeting: go through all the programs of the association and decide, based on which we believe are highly correlated with member satisfaction, which we should track and which we shouldn't.

The problem is that not everyone may agree with the decisions in this space, and there is unfortunately a large absence of data on which to base some of these determinations. And even asking the question can sometimes lead one down a rabbit hole one would rather not go down.

Our Annual Conference? That's correlated with member satisfaction, right? I mean, if someone is taking the time and paying the cost to attend the conference, they're likely to renew their membership, right? What about our data programs? If the member is contributing their own data to help us to produce that benchmark report for the industry, then they're obviously interested in staying a member, right? And what about our trade show? And that job fair we launched for our industry? Members who participated there are satisfied with their membership, right?

Typically, my short answer to all these questions is "yes." It frankly has to be. To make the exercise worthwhile, we have to accept that higher levels of member participation in programs equals higher levels of member satisfaction.

But that, admittedly, is a generalization, and there are undoubtedly circumstances where such a correlation does not exist. They went to the Annual Conference, but were unimpressed with the speakers. They give us their data, but no one in the company can find a use for the resulting report. They exhibit at the trade show, but they didn't get enough leads out of it. They show up at the job fair, but are still struggling to hire the right people.

My advice is not to get trapped in these details and concerns. Separate satisfaction surveys and interviews are a better way to make these assessments and to correct them if necessary. When working on your participation tracking system, stay focused on the goal of just tracking participation where you think it matters.

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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.

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Talk Talk by T. C. Boyle

I didn’t dogear a single page in this novel. And if you know me and my affinity for Boyle, that’s really saying something.

But why? Is the novel not any good? No, the novel is a delight. I took it with me on my last vacation and it delivered exactly what I wanted: a pleasant and engaging escape.

Then why no dogears? Was there nothing worth citing? Were there no dazzling flashes of Boyle’s hyperbolic prose? Well … honestly, no. There weren’t. And that, I think, may be a good thing.

And I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Here are some quotes from the congratulatory notes at the front of the paperback.

The New York Times: “He manages here to mix clever narrative pyrotechnics with real character development.”

New York Daily News: “The normally extravagant T. C. Boyle tames himself in Talk Talk to deliver a chilling literary thriller.”

Entertainment Weekly: “When Boyle finds the delicate balance between his over-the-top satirical impulses and his startling sentimentality, no American novelist can touch him.”

For the last two Boyle books I’ve read (Without a Hero and Riven Rock), I blogged that the transcendent prose is the main reason to keep reading Boyle and that, if there is any criticism to offer, it is that his plots never seem able to deliver the same kind of punch. Talk Talk strikes a better balance, with characters, pacing, and events, like its prose, better grounded in reality.

So which Boyle do I like better? Well, perhaps the Rocky Mountain News can provide a clue: “An identity-theft thriller that will appeal even to John Grisham readers.”

Hmmm. I wonder if that was meant as a compliment?

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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.

The Chairman's Gift Revisited

I wrote a blog post back in July 2012 called The Chairman's Gift. It's a pretty popular post, making most of my year-end Top Five lists, and capturing the eighth most number of pageviews from among the more than 600 posts that have appeared on this blog.

In it, I describe a tradition we have in our association of giving a gift to our outgoing Chairman of the Board. Unlike some other associations, who traditionally give a desk clock or a Mont Blanc pen in these circumstances, our tradition is to give something with unique value and importance to the person receiving the gift. We want to get our outgoing chair something he or she will truly remember. Something he or she will appreciate just as much as we appreciated his or her service as chair.

Over the years we have given a great variety of items, usually enlisting the secret help of the chair's spouse to help us identify the right thing. We just went through the ritual again at our Board's fiscal year-end retreat -- the place where we set our goals for the new year and one chair passes the gavel to the next. And the look on our outgoing chair's face when he opened his gift -- at that very moment, like a kid opening a box on Christmas day, before he had the box fully unwrapped, but when he realized what it was that we had given him -- that's what reminded me of the message I had written in that post seven years ago.

As wonderful as it is to thank, to delight, to touch the person who I've worked with for another successful year in leading our organization forward, the best part of this tradition continues to be the message it delivers to everyone else at the retreat.

The other folks sitting at the banquet tables, some of whom have been part of the association leadership for years and others who are attending their first event. Folks who may not have known what they were getting themselves into when they accepted the invitation to attend or to join the Board of Directors. Folks who had sat solidly in "listen-only mode" for the strategic discussions we had just had for the past day and a half.

To those people, most of all, the chairman's gift, and the manner in which it was given and received, demonstrates more than anything else we could do that this association is a family, and that we care about each other in ways that go beyond financial reports, strategic objectives, and key performance indicators.

And that, as I said seven years ago, is worth the extra time and expense we put into our chairman gifts.

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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.

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Dragons - Chapter 13 (DRAFT)

That night over dinner I told Jenny about what had happened in the office. Her reaction surprised me.

“You should start looking for a new job.”

“What?” I asked. We were sitting across from each other at the dining room table, Jacob long since excused and playing up in his room, and the dirty plates from a hastily-devoured meal scattered about.

“You don’t have to quit tomorrow or anything,” Jenny said, pushed back from the table and swirling the last sip of milk around in her glass. She was about five months pregnant with our second child then, and we had long since switched to drinking milk out of our wine glasses. “But that place is poison. You should start looking for something new.”

It took my mind a moment to process what she was saying. I had been at the company for twelve years, hired right out of college. I had been promoted several times, most recently to Deputy Account Executive for the company’s largest client. In their way, they had been good to me, and raises had come each year and with each promotion.

“Do you really think it’s time for that?” I asked.

Jenny nodded. “I do. Look at what they did today. This isn’t the first time they’ve put the needs of the company ahead of those of their people.”

“But I don’t feel threatened at all. And with this new position it’s almost as if I’ve entered a kind of inner circle. I think this new assignment Mary’s given me is a really big deal. She’s put me in charge of redesigning the hiring process for the entire company.”

Jenny had been emptying her glass and now she hastily swallowed so she could interject. “Alan, don’t get me started on Mary Walton,” she said, her voice husky from the milk still coating her throat. “You know how I feel about her.”

I certainly did. Jenny and Mary only saw each other twice a year—at the company’s summer picnic and again at its Christmas party—but in the last couple of years the tension between them seemed almost palpable. It started immediately following Jacob’s birth when Mary had asked Jenny when she was planning on going back to work. Jenny had always been very career-focused, so it was a question she was hearing a lot in those days. But when she told Mary with her usual aplomb that we had decided to give it a go with Jenny staying at home with the baby, Mary had given Jenny such a sour look, I thought someone had slipped a cockroach into her holiday punch.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” I remember Mary saying in her uniquely condescending way.

And I remember Jenny looking back at her blankly, surprised, I know, at the idea that someone would think she would make such a decision without being sure it was the right thing to do. Jenny was sure about everything she did—that’s one of the things that made her Jenny—and she had a hard time keeping the disdain out of her voice when someone questioned her. “Of course,” she had said assuredly. “Alan and I think it’s what’s best for Jacob, and we’re comfortable enough right now that we can make ends meet without my salary.”

If anything, Mary’s look had turned even more sour upon receiving this information. Both of Mary’s kids had gone straight into daycare after they had been born—by scheduled c-section, if you were to believe the office rumors; scheduled, of course, to avoid any conflicts with client meetings—and it was a well known fact that women professionals who decided to stay home after the birth of a child were something less than human in Mary’s eyes. It happened time and again. Whoever it was, no matter how high in esteem Mary might have previously held them, once they made that one unforgivable decision, Mary started giving off this vibe that they were no longer to be spoken of in her presence. And if you ever forced Mary to mention them, she would always be sure to make a snide remark about how incompetent they had been and about how the company was much better off without them.

From that day forward, Mary started treating Jenny exactly the same way. At each Christmas party she would mostly avoid Jenny, looking contemptuously at her from across the room, and at each summer picnic, when it was harder to surround herself exclusively with co-conspirators and sycophants, any words she happened to offer would be as cold as the tubs of catered potato salad.

I looked down at Jenny’s belly, just beginning to peep out between the bottom of her top and the top of her pants. “Okay, forget Mary Walton. What about the new baby?”

Jenny instinctively put a protective hand on her stomach as she placed the wineglass back on the table. “What about her?”

“Well, don’t I need this job to support you and the two kids? We decided you should stay home with Jacob because we didn’t think it made sense for you to keep working just so we could pay for daycare. Doesn’t that same logic hold true for Crazy Horse?”

It was the joke name we were using to refer to the baby until we settled on a real name.

“I said you didn’t have to quit your job tomorrow. We do need your income, but you can start keeping your eyes open, can’t you? Apply only when it seems like a good opportunity. Let them know your current employer doesn’t know you’re looking. They’ll keep it confidential. Come on, Alan. People do this kind of thing every day.”

Jenny was right, I knew she was—both about how people found new positions and about how it was time for me to at least start looking. But something in me still rebelled against the idea. I shook my head.

“I don’t know, honey. With Susan gone things are going to get a lot busier for me. Until we hire her replacement I’m going to have to pick up her workload in addition to mine.”

Jenny looked at me skeptically. “Until who hires her replacement?”

“We,” I said, not sure what Jenny was driving at. “Until we hire her replacement.”

“We as in you and Mary?” Jenny asked. “Do you honestly think that woman is going to involve you in the process this time? You weren’t consulted at all when she hired Susan—even though you had spent three years in the position she was hiring for and would be supervising whoever she brought in to fill your shoes. What’s going to make this time any different?”

“The new project,” I said, somewhat defensively. “I’m going to revise the way the company screens and interviews applicants.”

“And Mary is going to wait until you have that finished before she begins interviewing candidates for Susan’s position?”

It was a good question. Reflecting back on my conversation with Mary, I realized I didn’t have a clear answer to it. But evidently Jenny did.

“No, wait,” Jenny laughed, waving her hands in the air. “That makes even more sense. That’s exactly what she’s going to do. Look at what she’s done. As long as you’re working on this project, she has a reason for not moving forward in hiring a replacement for Susan. And all that time you’ll be doing both your job and Susan’s job for her. Same amount of work getting done, one less set of salary and benefits to pay for. What a bitch.”

I looked at Jenny suspiciously, not wanting to accept her interpretation, but knowing that it at least fit within Mary’s pattern of behavior.

“You’re definitely going to start looking for a new job. I’ll help if I have to, but you’ve got to start thinking about getting out of there.”

I smiled at her. We had been married long enough for me to know that when she spoke with that kind of finality there wasn’t much else I could do. She certainly wasn’t going to change her mind.
“Yes, mum,” I said with mock servility. “Would you like me to do the dishes before drawing m’lady’s bath?”

“Very funny,” Jenny said with a smirk. “No, I’ll clean up here. Go spend some time with your son.”

It was Jenny’s way of letting me know she needed some “away” time. Seeing to Jacob’s needs all day had proven more demanding that either of us had thought. But she wasn’t being selfish. She knew I wanted to spend as much time as I could with Jacob. Too often, it seemed, I would be working late or stuck on the road, and days would go by before he and I had any meaningful contact.

I went upstairs and found him in his room playing with his trains. While Jenny and I had talked he had set up an elaborate track all over his floor. The wooden pieces were normally kept in an enormous plastic tote in the corner of his room, but he had fished most of them out and had assembled them into a maze of switches, bridges and crossings. Part of it even extended under his bed, the trains coming out from under the drape of his bedspread like they were going through a tunnel. I stood in the doorway for a few moments, watching him push long trains of magnetically-connected cars around, and marveling at the exactness that my four-year-old son could sometimes display.

“Hi, buddy,” I said eventually.

“Hi, Daddy,” he replied, not taking his eyes off his work. “Do you want to play trains with me?”

“Okay,” I said, and I got down on the floor with him. “Who’s this?” I asked, pointing to a green-painted engine off on a siding with three cars behind it.

“That’s Percy,” Jacob said.

“Can I be Percy?” I asked.

“Okay. But you have to go through the trainwash first.”

“The what?”

“The trainwash,” Jacob said patiently, pointing to a wooden structure with two blue rubber rollers on either side of the track and a gray-painted wooden cylinder labeled “WATER” on the very top. “All the engines have to be clean before they leave the station.”

Of course they did. It was one of the life lessons they tried to teach the kids on the television show the train engines lived on. A smart engine keeps himself clean, boys and girls. I had watched some of the shows with Jacob, and they were always trying to impart some kind of do-gooder morality—you know, be nice to others, take care of the planet, don’t ask too many questions. It was thinly-veiled indoctrination for pre-schoolers, and its icons were reinforced with every trip down a toy aisle or through a grocery store. These train engines, each with a cheeky human face stuck on its front end, showed up on everything a child may come into contact with—from tennis shoes and underpants to juice boxes and toaster waffles. They were everywhere, and in their insidious ubiquity they tried to convince their acolytes the world was a place where every problem could be solved by just trying a little harder and working together as a team.

“Who do you have over there?” I asked, beginning to push Percy through the rollers in the trainwash.

“I’m Gordon,” Jacob said proudly. “He’s the biggest and strongest engine there is.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Is he fast?”

“He’s superfast!”

“Is he faster than Percy?”

“He’s faster than everyone, Daddy.”

“Should we have a race?”

Jacob looked at me excitedly. “A race?”

“Sure,” I said, confidently. “We can build a pair of tracks that the engines can race down. We’ll start them at the top and see which one goes the farthest.”

My suggestion had lit a fire in Jacob’s eyes. “Can we race Thomas, too?”

“Of course,” I said. “Bring them out. We’ll race them all.”

I spent the next twenty minutes trying to construct a race track that would serve our purposes, eventually deciding I had to roll up Jacob’s area rug and build directly on the hardwood floor so the wooden blocks and pieces would be stable enough to create the effect we wanted. At one point Jenny stuck her head in the room—evidently finished with the dishes—and asked what we were doing.

“We’re building a race track, Mommy!” Jacob said, jumping up and down with excitement. “Daddy and me are going to race my engines!”

Jenny looked skeptical. “All right. Just be sure to clean up when you’re done, okay? And put the rug back.”

“Yes, Mommy,” I said.

When we had the track built the races began. Jacob had eight engines, so I put them in qualifying heats and then I sketched a kind of NCAA bracket tournament on the inside cover of one of his coloring books. Jacob was unbelievably excited with every race, jumping for joy and cheering for his favorite engine in each pairing. I quickly learned all of their names and which ones had a special place in his heart. One, in fact, was not an engine at all, but an old-fashioned double-decker bus named Bertie. Jacob thought it was hysterical every time Bertie raced.

“Bertie can’t win!” he would laugh. “He’s not an engine!”

In the end, the championship was between Jacob’s beloved Thomas, and a sneering black engine named Diesel. Superfast Gordon had fallen in the first round.

“Are you ready, Jacob?” I said, trying to build as much drama as I could. “Are you ready for the final race in the ultimate Jacob Larson Train Engine Championship?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“On the right track,” I said, cupping my hand over my mouth to imitate the sound of an announcement coming over a loudspeaker, “painted blue and red and puffing white smoke, the number one really useful engine…Thomas!”

“Yaaaaay!” Jacob shouted, jumping up and down and flapping his hands like a flightless bird. “Yaay, Thomas!”

“And on the left track,” I continued, “painted black and red and reeking of oily fumes, the engine everyone loves to hate…it’s Diesel!”

“Boooo!” cried Jacob. “Not Diesel! Thomas! Go Thomas!”

Diesel, I remembered, was the engine always causing trouble on the TV show, the one the other engines had to clean up after, or help each other out of the messes he created. But the little wooden and plastic toy that bore his likeness had legitimately earned its way into the championship race. He and Thomas both had consistently sailed down the sloping tracks I had built, and had rolled farther across the floor than anyone else. It was truly a battle of titans and I didn’t know who was going to win.

I let the two engines go and they flew down the track, leaping off the end at precisely the same time, and then rolling neck and neck across the floor. Jacob was screaming with excitement, hooting and hollering at Thomas to go, Go, GO!

“And the winner…” I crowed, feeling invincible at having concocted such a captivating activity for Jacob and watching as the two engines came to a stop, one just half a length ahead of the other, “…is Diesel!” I started making sounds like those of a roaring crowd.

“Noooo!” Jacob groaned, all the fun of the past half an hour suddenly evaporating in the heat of his burned expectations. “No, Daddy!” he complained petulantly. “Not Diesel! Thomas! Thomas is the winner!”

“No he’s not, buddy,” I said with a smile, noticing how red his face was and surprised at his angry tone. “Take a look. Diesel went farther. He’s the winner.”

“NOOOO!” Jacob shrieked, the high pitch of his voice piercing painfully into my ears, and then he frantically rushed forward in an attempt to kick the engines, as if needing to destroy the evidence of Thomas’s ignoble defeat. In his mad rush he stumbled over the rolled-up area rug and he fell into the wooden ramps, knocking them over in a clatter of falling blocks and pieces of track, and thumping his forehead hard on the exposed floor. Seeing him go down I lurched forward to try and break his fall but was only able to bring him into my lap after the damage had been done. The caterwauling cries that followed brought Jenny quickly to the door.

“What happened?!” she demanded.

I was focused on Jacob, trying to console him as best I could, but as soon as he saw Jenny he began to fight against me, squirming down halfway onto the floor again, his shirt bunching up near his red face and exposing his belly.

“Alan, what happened?!” Jenny said again, her voice loud and powerful.

“He fell!” I shouted at her, trying to make myself heard over Jacob’s cries.

“Fell?” she said. “Fell how?”

I couldn’t make any sense out of her question. Not with a bellowing and writhing four-year old in my lap busily coating my shirt sleeves with tears and snot. “What do you mean, fell how? He fell! He tripped over the damn rug!”

Jenny gave me an exasperated look and then rushed forward to take Jacob away. He went gratefully into her arms and she stood there rocking with him, his growing toddler legs dangling awkwardly down as she both shushed him and tried to get a better look at his face.

“He’s bruised!” she gasped upon seeing the red splotch on his forehead. “Did he hit his head?”

I was still sitting on the floor amidst all the rubble of scattered train tracks, trying to wrap my brain around what had just happened. We had been having so much fun, my son and I, and then, it seemed, a tornado had come out of nowhere and torn the roof off our house. Was there anything I could have done to prevent it? At the time I didn’t think so, and it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that I’ve come to realize that I could have pretended Thomas had won.

“Alan!” she shouted at me. “Did Jacob hit his head?”

“I don’t fucking know!” I shouted back. “I think so.”

It was the worst thing I could have said. Head injuries were serious business in Jenny’s mother book. And I had seen Jacob bang his forehead against the hardwood floor with my own eyes, but in my distracted state I had said I didn’t know, and that was tantamount to admitting I had been an inattentive father. Jenny looked at me with a kind of horror and then took our son from the room, Jacob wailing and crying the entire time.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

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.

Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Customer Service Not Worth Emulating

A bit of a rant this week.

On my most recent business trip, a staff member of mine rented a car for us. She is not a "preferred" member of the rental car company she worked with, so she had to stand in line and wait to be served.

It was awful. There was only one agent working the desk and I counted nine people in front of my staff member. I timed how long the first person took at the counter. Eleven minutes. I timed the second. Twelve minutes. At that rate we were looking at an hour and a half wait.

Then a second agent appeared and began helping the next person in line. All right, I thought. Now we're down to forty-five minutes. I can handle that.

Except that after the first agent finished with the customer he had been helping when the second agent appeared, he announced he was going on his lunch break and left. There were still five people in line in front of my staff member and three more that had queued up behind her.

At that point, I pulled out my smartphone and rented a car from the same company on their mobile app. As a "preferred" member, I was able to skip the remaining line and head directly out to the lot. After a quick stop at the "preferred" desk, my staff member and I were in a car and heading to our destination, no questions asked.

Now, this is not the first time I've experienced the kabuki theater that is the rental car counter. Before becoming a "preferred" member I had stood in that interminable line myself, and am still occasionally subject to it when traveling with someone else.

One big question I have is why. Why, in this day and age, is the process of renting a car anything other than the "preferred" experience? "Preferred" or not, we all make the reservation online, we all choose our options, we all enter our drivers license and credit card information. Why is any other step necessary other than showing your license and proving you are who you say you are?

But an even bigger question I have is how these companies stay in business if this is their model of customer service. Imagine an association conference in which the registrant shows up after having registered and paid online, and then is forced to stand in line where the association takes ten minutes with each and every person ahead of them to both verify their information and to try to upsell them on a variety of products and protections they have already decided they don't need or want.

How long would that registrant stay a member of that association? How long would that association be in business?

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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.

Image Source
https://www.masterfile.com/search/en/people+in+queue+texting+images

X Matrix by Darrell Casey

There’s a long subtitle here: “Strategy Deployment and Execution Process for Breakthrough Business Performance.” The book was given to be by the Board chair of the association I work for and, although clearly written for a manufacturing environment, there are some transferable ideas that could benefit those non-profit organizations.

X Matrix is the name of the system the author describes in what is obviously a self-published and, unfortunately, typo-riddled treatise. He calls it that because the basic framework is a matrix with a big X in the middle. It’s going to be too hard to describe, so here’s the essential picture:

See the big X in the middle?

You’re supposed to start at the bottom with your Breakthrough Objectives. In the manufacturing world, that might be something like “Reduce reject parts per million by 90% in 3 years.” In my association’s space, the Breakthrough Objectives translate most easily to the Idealized States of our Success Metrics. Let’s use the one associated with our own manufacturer members as our example. Given our analysis of the marketplace, there are 250 companies that are eligible for manufacturer memberships in our association, and who would find value in the member benefits we offer. At the end of our last fiscal year, we had 193. So, “Grow to 250 manufacturer members in 10 years” would be our Breakthrough Objective. That’s what Casey would call the “WHAT?”

Next comes the “HOW FAR?” These are the Annual Improvement Objectives. You know what your Breakthrough Objective is, but achieving that is supposed to take you three to five years (or in my case, ten). How much of that are you going to get done this year? In the manufacturing world, that might be something like “Reduce reject parts per million by 45%.” In my association’s space, the Annual Improvement Objectives translate most easily to the Goals that we set for each Success Metric. To continue our example, we’ve set as this year’s goal growing from 193 to 200 manufacturer members in the association. So we would write “Grow to 200 manufacturer members” on one of these lines and associate it with the Breakthrough Objective by putting an X in the box that aligns with both of these lines.

Next comes the “HOW?” These are the Annual Improvement Priorities. You know how far you want to get this year, but how are you going to do that? Which key processes are you going to focus your attention on so that you can actually reach your Annual Objective? In the manufacturing world, that might be things like “Improve quality of raw materials,” or “Improve machining processes,” or “Introduce quality checks earlier in manufacturing process.” In my association’s space, the Annual Improvement Priorities translate most easily to the Program Objectives that we’ve aligned with each Goal. Same logic. At the programmatic level of our association, what are we going to work on so that our Goal can be reached? To continue our example, we can write things like...

Ambassador Program: Connect targeted prospects to membership ambassadors at conferences and convert them as new members.

Member Retention: Identify members at-risk for non-renewal, organize and conduct a program of contacts encouraging engagement in association activities and programs, and highlight the benefits of maintaining membership.

Non-Renewal Conversion: Convert non-renewing members to membership within this fiscal year.

Trial Membership Program: Offer targeted prospects limited access to association market information and statistics and/or free or discounted access to selected association events, and convert them as new members.

...on these lines (all of which I abbreviated above), again connecting them to the right Annual Improvement Objective by putting Xs in the right boxes.

Next comes the “HOW MUCH AND WHEN?” These are Targets to Improve. We know what our Annual Improvement Priorities are, but how are we going to execute them and measure their success? In the manufacturing world, if the Annual Improvement Priority is to “Introduce quality checks earlier in manufacturing process,” then the Targets to Improve might be to “Hire more quality managers,” or “Review new quality logs in weekly meetings,” or “Train machine operators in basic quality assurance techniques.” In my association’s space, the Targets to Improve translate most easily to the Action Plan steps that we create for each Program Objective. They are the concrete steps that we will take to ensure that the Program Objective is achieved. To continue our example, focusing solely on our Ambassador Program, we can write things like “Identify prospects,” “Assign prospects to Board members,” and “Organize networking event at conference” on the these lines, and connect them to the “Ambassador Program” by putting Xs in the right boxes.

Still with me? Because we’re almost done. The last step is “WHO?” as in Resource Deployment. You’re supposed to fill in people’s names on the lines below the Targets to Improve and connect them to the Annual Improvement Objectives with more Xs in the right boxes. In my association example, I can assign each Objective to Alan, Bethany, Charles, and Dana.

And that’s it. That’s the system. A whole strategic and operational plan in one glance. It works great in my oversimplified example, where we’re dealing with only one Breakthrough Objective and only one Annual Improvement Objective. Start multiplying those items (as you do in any real organization) and the chart begins to grow more and more complex, until its utility has been replaced with the significant effort it takes to maintain and follow it.

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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.