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

The subtitle here is “Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals,” something the authors almost immediately start referring to as WIGs, and then proceed to provide a deceptively simple and oddly compelling system for doing exactly that. They call it 4DX, short for the Four Disciplines of Execution, and here 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

I’m not going to give a comprehensive summary, but here are a few things that really spoke to me as I went through the book.

People Are Not the Problem

In a key study on organizational change, the global management-consulting firm Bain & Company reports these findings: “About 65 percent of initiatives required significant behavioral change on the part of front-line employees--something that managers often fail to consider or plan for in advance.”

Despite the significance of this problem, leaders seldom recognize it. You don’t hear leaders saying, “I wish I were better at driving strategies that require people to do things differently.” What you are more likely to hear is a leader saying, “I wish I didn’t have Tom, Paul, and Sue to deal with!”

It’s natural for a leader to assume the people are the problem. After all, they are the ones not doing what we need to have done. But you would be wrong. The people are not the problem!

W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. The problem is inherent in the system. As a leader, you own responsibility for the system. Although a particular person can be a big problem, if you find yourself blaming the people, you should look again.

I could so easily be of two minds on this--and could probably argue both sides endlessly. But I suspect at the end I would come down on the side of Deming. The people are not the problem. One person may be a problem, but it is far more likely--and helpful--to understand that the problem is the system, not the people that comprise it.

Much of this book is premised on this core concept, and the challenge is that the system is all-too-often an unwieldy and unforgiving whirlwind of activity, where too many priorities compete for too little time, attention and resources.

The first discipline, Focus on the Wildly Important, confronts this reality head-on, saying that despite the whirlwind, teams need to focus their time, attention and resources on a very small number (in most cases, one) of Wildly Important Goals (WIGs).

Top Down Doesn’t Work

The highest levels of execution are never reached when the strategy is devised solely by the top leaders of the organization and simply handed down to the leaders and teams below.

I totally agree. And that’s where the second discipline, Act on the Lead Measures, comes in. Maybe the boss sets the WIG--always, according to the authors, in the form of a “lag measure,” a “from X to Y by when” statement--but the boss can’t choose the lead measures--the things that the team will focus on and try to effect in order to see action on the goal.

To pick up one of the book’s examples, a hotel identified “Increase revenue from corporate events” as their WIG, and then created a lag measure that set the goal as moving from $22 to $31 million by December 31st. Then it was up to multiple teams across the staff to identify their own lead measures--the things they could do week-in and week-out, that would have the greatest potential impact on achieving the lag measure. One chose “completing two quality site visits per week.” Another chose “upsell our premium bar package to 90% of all events.” Instead of designing a strategy from the top down, once the WIG and its lag measure was made clear, the strategies came from the bottom up.

Focus on Behaviors, Not Outcomes

This approach really reminds me of a blog post I wrote some time ago where I posed the idea that to ensure greater success, we should measure and reward the behaviors that lead to good outcomes, not the outcomes themselves. When we reward people for “getting new members to join the association,” I remember saying, people start doing all kinds of things that really don’t serve the long-term interests of the organization. But when you reward people for “visiting two prospective members per week” people do the things that do serve the organization’s interest and which tightly correlate with increasing the number of members in the association.

People Play Differently When They’re Keeping Score

Remember, people play differently when they are keeping score. The difference in performance between a team that simply understands their lead and lag measures as a concept, and a team that actually knows their score, is remarkable. If the lead and lag measures are not captured on a visual scorecard and updated regularly, they will disappear into the distraction of the whirlwind. Simply put, people disengage when they don’t know the score. When they can see at a glance whether or not they are winning they become profoundly engaged.

This brings in the book’s third discipline, Keep a Compelling Scorecard. And the best example the authors offer is something they call “Beat the Goat.”

Hopefully, the image says it all. Once you have a lag measure in place, you can easily create a graph that shows how that measure has to progress over time in order to meet its goal. That’s the “goat.” Then, by plotting your actual progress on the same graph, you can see week-by-week if your lead measures are helping you “beat the goat.”

This is where I really began to see the potential power of this system, but it is also about where I began to wonder how such a system could be wholistically applied to the notoriously difficult-to-measure world of association management. Some of the things we seek to achieve can be readily measured (e.g., membership growth, meeting attendance, fundraising) but others are more complicated (e.g., creating a better educated workforce, promoting the industry). For some of these latter goals you can certainly pick numerical metrics to determine their success, but experience has shown that whichever you choose tend to de-escalate the scope of what you’re trying to achieve.

In other words, measure how many students receive scholarships from your Foundation and you’ve changed your goal from creating a better educated workforce to giving out scholarships. Measure how many media impressions your press release generates and you’ve changed your goal from promoting the industry to getting things published in the press.

Still, the point the authors seek to make should not be lost. Part of what 4DX is doing is creating a winnable game for your team to focus on and accomplish. The strategic goal may be creating a better educated workforce or promoting the industry, but the authors would probably tell me those aren’t winnable games. Giving scholarships to 25 high school students who achieved a 3.5 GPA or better and intend to study your industry’s field in college before the end of your fiscal year and sharing one marketplace example per week for the next 26 weeks of the advantages of your industry’s technology with your list of media contacts--those may not get you to your big picture objectives, but they are winnable games. And…

A winning team doesn’t need artificial morale boosting. All the psyching up and rah-rah exercises companies do to raise morale aren’t nearly as effective in engaging people as the satisfaction that comes from executing with excellence a goal that really matters.

They Will Tear Down Walls

The authors tell a compelling story in the book about a company called Towne Park.

The largest provider of valet parking services for high-end hotels and hospitals, Towne Park has always been extremely well run. When Gaylord Entertainment (one of Towne Park’s largest customers) had great success as an early adopter of the 4DX, the leaders at Towne Park became interested as well.

Towne Park was already measuring virtually every aspect of its business: Did attendants open the door for you and your guests when you arrived? Did they use the proper hotel greeting? Did they offer you a bottle of water? Their execs could tell you all this, as they were literally measuring everything they thought mattered to their customers.

Still, they decided to apply 4DX to the wildly important goal of the company, increasing customer satisfaction, to see if they could improve it even more. While developing lead measures in Discipline 2, they realized that one thing they weren’t measuring might actually be their point of highest leverage in pleasing the customer: How long it takes the customer to get his or her car back.

So, they chose reducing retrieval time as the most predictive lead measure for further improving customer satisfaction. Although they had always known this was an important aspect of the business, they had never measured it because it isn’t an easy measure to get, even for a company that believes in measurement. They knew that collecting retrieval-time data would require them to clock when the customer called for the car and when the valet arrived with the car. The elapsed time between the two points, the retrieval time, would then need to be consistently captured for all teams in all locations.

You can imagine how difficult it would be to gather this data in the whirlwind of incoming and outgoing cars, so difficult that some leaders argued that it couldn’t be done. However, because they were committed to their WIG of unparalleled customer satisfaction, and because they believed retrieval time was the most predictive and influenceable measure for achieving it, they committed to tracking it. Like all great leadership teams, once the decision was made, they found a way.

Initially, they wondered if retrieval time was really influenceable because of all the external factors that impact it, such as the location of the parking area and the distance to the car. Despite these worries, they were able to reduce retrieval time dramatically.

How? The teams figured it out because they were highly engaged in the game. Once the lead measure went up on the scoreboard, the valets began finding new ways to win. For example, they started advising arriving guests to call before checking out so that their car would be waiting for them. Whenever a guest called in advance, the valet knew the retrieval time would be zero.

The valets also began to ask what day the guest planned on checking out. If it was later in the week, they would park the car in the back of the lot. As the day of departure drew closer, they would move the car forward so that retrieval time would be reduced.

These and a host of other innovations not only reduced the lead measure of retrieval time, but immediately raised the lag measure of customer satisfaction. Towne Park was winning, but without the team’s engagement in the game, these ideas might never have surfaced, let alone been implemented.

With me so far? Okay. Here’s where the story gets really remarkable.

However, a Towne Park team in Miami, Florida, faced an obstacle that seemed insurmountable: A four-foot high concrete wall ran down the middle of the parking garage, forcing the valets to drive around it to retrieve every car.

After several months of trying to compensate for the wall, a literal breakthrough came during their WIG session. James McNeil, one of the assistant account managers, committed to his team that the wall was coming out. He obtained clearance from the hotel’s engineer who confirmed that the wall was not load-bearing, borrowed a concrete saw, and recruited several other supervisors to help. Starting early the following Saturday morning, they cut and hauled out several tons of concrete; by the end of the day, the wall was gone.

If you’re a leader, you should be fascinated by this story.

I am.

If a Towne Park executive had ordered the team to do something as far outside their normal responsibilities as removing a concrete wall, what do you think the team’s reaction would have been? At best, resistance, and at worst, mutiny, even from a good team.

But because the lead measure had become a high-stakes game, one the players didn’t want to lose, the effect was the opposite. Taking out the wall was their idea; and their desire to win was so strong, you couldn’t have kept them from doing it. Necessity really is the mother of invention. Once they made retrieval time a high-stakes game, the creativity and invention followed.

What’s critical to understand is that this level of engagement seldom if ever comes from a command-and-control approach--that is, one that relies exclusively on the formal authority of the leader. Authority alone at best yields only compliance from a team.

By contrast, 4DX produces results not from the exercise of authority but from the fundamental desire of each individual team member to feel significant, to do work that matters, and ultimately, to win.

That kind of engagement yields true commitment, the kind of commitment that led a Towne Park team to tear down a wall. And it’s only that kind of commitment that produces extraordinary results.

So, How Would This Work in My Organization?

I don’t know. But I have some ideas and I’m talking to my senior staff about them right now.

One of our challenges is that many of our obvious WIGs do not easily translate into lag measures that can be phrased as a “from X to Y by when” statement, and for those that do, it will be challenging to come up with lead measures that can reasonably be expected to “beat the goat.”

Are you up for some “inside baseball” analysis of my own association--the National Fluid Power Association (NFPA)? If not, stop reading now.

Okay? I warned you. Here’s a simplified version of our current strategic plan:

As an organization, we have three strategic priorities. In our lexicon, a strategic priority is a kind of vision statement--an aspirational statement of an envisioned future we need to work towards if we are to fulfill our mission. One of those priorities is:

Build and connect our members to an educated fluid power workforce.

Each strategic priority has a number of objectives. These are shorter-term goals that we believe will help bring about the envisioned future described in the priority statement. Our “workforce” strategic priority has three objectives. One is:

Introduce fluid power to middle and high school students, and connect their classrooms with local NFPA members for mentorship and support.

Each objective has a number of program goals. These are year-long objectives associated with specific programs that we manage that are aligned with the spirit of the objective. Our “pre-college” objective has four program goals. One is:

Expand the number of Fluid Power Challenge events, and the number of NFPA members participating as hosts, sponsors, mentors and judges.

So, in this structure, what should we call our WIGs? My initial thought is to make our strategic priorities the WIGs, but wonder what the discipline of defining lag and lead measures at that level will do to how the organization functions.

Take the “workforce” example. If we stay tightly focused on the existing language--build and connect our members to an educated fluid power workforce--our lag measure(s) could logically be something like: “Increase the number of graduates with advanced fluid power training from X to Y in the next academic year,” or “Increase the number of member/student connections at NFPA events from X to Y in the next academic year.” Neither is how we currently define success in this area, primarily because measuring that baseline figure X is difficult in our environment. But assuming we could, these lag measure would replace what we know think of as our objectives.

And these lag measures could lead, I think, to a set of lead measures that are very different from the program goals we currently have. Say we choose “Increase the number of member/student connections at NFPA events from X to Y in the next academic year” as our lag measure. Thinking about the programs we currently manage, and the kinds of actions the staff who run them could take in order to move that needle, someone might come up with “Stage one regional Fluid Power Challenge program per month in this academic year,” or “Invite 50 NFPA members from the closest member companies to attend each Challenge program” as their lead measures.

So, let’s compare the two versions:

Notice any differences? Well, first and foremost, NFPA on 4DX has actual metrics of success baked into the “objective” and “program goal” statements--now known as our lag and lead measures. Metrics aren’t something we ignore in our current version, but they are compositionally separated from the objective and program goal statements. 4DX puts those metrics front and center and provides clearer targets to shoot for.

But are they the right targets? Frankly, I don’t have any idea. As I described above, we may now be measuring how many members we invite to attend our Fluid Power Challenge programs--but does success in that area mean that we are connecting our members to a better educated workforce?

Maybe that’s part of a process--we have to set and shoot at a few targets not just for the practice of hitting them, but for the practice of better understanding which targets are the ones worth hitting. But I worry that hitting targets that prove to be the wrong ones--that is, targets that don’t actually move the lag measure or accomplish the wildly important goal--will have the opposite effect on staff motivation than what our friends at Towne Park experienced.

So that makes me think that we should be looking deeper into our plan for our WIGs. All the way down to the program goal level--at least initially--so we can be better assured of not just hitting our target, but choosing the right one for achieving the WIG.

Keeping with the current example, if “Expand the number of Fluid Power Challenge events, and the number of NFPA members participating as hosts, sponsors, mentors and judges” was the WIG, the lag measures would practically write themselves. This is a program goal, so we know a lot more about their metrics and which ones track most closely to success. We know exactly how many Challenge events we held last year and we know exactly how many members participated as hosts, sponsors, mentors or judges. So lag measures like “Increase the number of Fluid Power Challenge events from 8 in 2013-14 to 12 in 2014-15” and “Increase the number of members participating as hosts, sponsors, mentors or judges from 24 in 2013-14 to 48 in 2014-15” quickly and easily come to mind.

And these lag measures make it a lot easier to identify the right lead measures. What are the one or two things that each staff person could do consistently to help bring the lag measures about? I wouldn’t write them for people, but at my level of the organization, I could say something like “Meet in-person with one member company per month to showcase the Fluid Power Challenge program and encourage them to get their people engaged as either a host, sponsor, mentor or judge.”

Now that I think this through, picking one of our 39 program goals to treat as a WIG is probably the best way to introduce 4DX into our environment. Rather than having everyone trying to tie their programs to a WIG that looks and feels like one of our strategic priorities--where the connections may be tenuous--staying at the program level gets everyone contributing to a much more winnable game. The weekly WIG session where we make our commitments and monitor our scorecard (that’s what the authors mean by their fourth discipline, by the way, Create a Cadence of Accountability) would really put the emphasis where it belongs and help pull everyone out of the whirlwind to achieve one collective objective.

It might be worth a try.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Three Kinds of Meetings

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I've been spending a lot of time on the road lately. Lately, as in the past decade or so. It's part of the life of most association executives. But lately, it's gotten me thinking about the three kinds of meetings I find myself at.

First, there are the meetings our associations plan themselves. Our conferences and trade shows and Board meetings. We have to attend those. Although I often joke that a well-planned meeting is like a freight train--we couldn't stop it if we tried--the fact is that these meetings wouldn't happen without us. They're ours.

Second, there are all the meetings we're invited to. Come give a presentation. Come participate in our discussion group. Come learn something important to your daily workload. We're not responsible for planning any of these meetings--and some have far more value to the planning organization than they do for us and our associations. These you have to weigh carefully. If you accept all the invitations you receive, you'll get nothing else done.

And third, there are the meetings, planned by somebody else, that you must invite yourself to. Fact is, there are things going on in your environment that are affecting you and the organization you represent, and not everyone is going to think to include you. You have to search these meetings out and get yourself there, invited or not.

For me, at least, the third kind is increasingly beginning to squeeze out the other two.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Your Leader Is In Control

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I do a fair amount of reading on leadership issues. And in doing so, I encounter the following sentiment--most recently in this Corner Office column--again and again.

I have learned that leadership is all about demonstrating and exuding confidence. One of my former bosses used to say: “There will always be uncertainty in your life, doubts about yourself, about the decision you’re about to make. Keep it inside. Process it. But don’t let it show on your face. You need to come out with a confident but simple description of the problem and tell people a simple three-step process for how we’re going to get out of the problem. Because they need to know that the leader is in control.”

Let's deconstruct. In my opinion, things start out well, but they quickly go downhill.

I agree that demonstrating and exuding confidence is an essential part of effective leadership. I'm not sure I would say that leadership is "all about" it, but I agree that it's hard to lead people if you aren't confident about the decisions you're making.

And I obviously agree that there will always be uncertainty in life, and that leaders will likely always have doubts about themselves and the decisions they are making. Generally, it makes sense to keep the bulk of that angst inside, but hiding it entirely from the people you lead may not be the best idea. If you're interested in developing the leadership skills of the people under you, shouldn't you be sharing part of your thought process with them? In other words, talk with them about the things that could go wrong and about how likely they are and what can be done to mitigate against them? That's not keeping the uncertainty inside.

And coming out with a simple description of the problem and a simple three-step process for how we're going to get out of it? That may be a tool you want in your leadership toolbox to be used in certain circumstances. But positioning it as some kind of cure-all for every situation? I think that's a bit extreme, especially when capped off with the excerpt's parting thought: "They need to know that the leader is in control."

In control? Control of what, exactly? Control of themselves--yes. Control of their decisions and the actions that flow from them--yes. But control of their environment and the forces that shape it? Do you really want your people to think that you're in control of that? I'm your leader, and I have a solution for every problem you will face. Can't you tell that by how confident my voice is?

This is the thing I encounter again and again. Followers must always know that their leader is in control. Every time I read that I ask myself why. Why do people need to know that their leader is in control? And what would happen if they would discover that he isn't?

Because guess what? He isn't. The leader isn't in control any more than you are. The good ones control themselves and their actions, but no leader controls the environment around them. If they appear to, they're either faking or deluding themselves, and in my book, neither one of those correlates with effective leadership.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Tommy by Eric Lanke

A little while ago, I made my novel, Columbia, available for download from this blog.

Columbia is the story of Theodore Lomax, a nineteen-year-old Union solider in the American Civil War, and as committed as any to the ideal of human freedom. After being assigned to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman, shortly after the general’s infamous March to the Sea, he willingly participates in the destruction of civilian property in Columbia, South Carolina, believing his acts are justified by Southern resistance to the Northern cause of emancipation. But when the destruction escalates into violence against the civilians themselves, he becomes disillusioned, and feels compelled to strike out in opposition to his own countrymen.

The novel is told from Lomax's point of view, but there are ten other supporting characters, each with a story of his or her own. "Tommy" is one of these stories, centering on the character of ten-year-old Tommy Pepper, and describing his adventures when playing hooky from school on the day that the Federal Army arrives in Columbia.

There was a time when I thought these stories should alternate with the chapters in Columbia, presenting a richer but perhaps more tangled tapestry of the lives that painfully converge in the novel's climactic scenes. But Columbia is clearly a more coherent narrative without them. Still, they were valuable to me as an author, and I hope you find them useful and enjoyable as a reader.

Tommy by Eric Lanke - $3

Clicking the "Add to Cart" button will take you through a short payment process and provide you with a PDF download of the story that you can read on your computer or tablet, or which you can print at your convenience. The story is about 14,500 words and the document is 47 pages long. Given its theme and historical setting, the work reflects the racism of the time, and includes episodes of violence and strong language.

Want a sample? Here's are the first thousand or so words.

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Playing hooky from school was getting so easy, Tommy Pepper thought that morning as he and his best friend Jackie Watson ran down the gully between the schoolhouse and the railroad tracks. It hardly seemed like they spent any time there at all anymore. There was a time when he would have caught hell for being marked absent from school—caught hell from his Pa—but his Pa had been off in the war for three years now, and his Ma was not able to control him. Never had been. She would read the notes they sent home—not the ones they gave him to deliver; no, not those. Those he would simply tear up and burn in the wood stove. But the ones they mailed or delivered in person, those she would read and then she would sigh heavily, and say, “Tommy, what am I do to with you? You simply must go to school. You must!” And Tommy would dutifully say, “Yes, Ma,” and that would be the end of it until the next note arrived and the cycle was repeated. If his Ma thought that was going to be enough to keep him in school while half the other kids were spending their days running around the city and getting into mischief, she had another thing coming. The war had brought all kinds of interesting things to Columbia for enterprising boys like Tommy and his friends to see and get tangled up with, things much more interesting than the dusty slates and rote memorization that pervaded the schoolhouse. It was downright stupid to think they would not take advantage of these opportunities when they presented themselves.

And this morning had been no exception. Tommy and his friends had been on hand to witness all sorts of events and spectacles that had come to the streets of Columbia. Early in the war there had been numerous regiments mustered in the town square, thousands of men from all over the county converging on the city to be counted, sorted, and put into orderly rows, while gray-uniformed officers walked among them, issuing orders and seeing to the dispersal of sacks and blankets. Tommy’s own father and older brother had been part of one of these musterings and they, like so many of their countrymen, had brought their own rifles and ammunition to help build the necessary firepower against the aggressors from the North. These events were more like holidays than anything else, with businesses closing, politicians making speeches, and whole families turning out to wish the young men well, cry, and cheer them as they marched in motley ranks out of the city. No one really expected Tommy and his friends to be in school on these festival-like days, but after the men had been made soldiers and the soldiers had gone to war, much of the heady fever that had gripped the city went with them, and the expectation that boys should be in school returned, like so many others associated with daily life.

But once given the taste of adventure, Tommy and his friends found its lure difficult to resist. They kept their ears to the ground as much as possible, thirsty for any rumor which would give them reason to skip school. A regiment from further south marching through town on its way to the front. A general or government official staying over in one of the downtown hotels. They would gladly wait for hours on a street corner if it meant getting out of school for the day, even if the rumored regiment failed to appear or the sequestered dignitary never left his hotel room. As time passed and they got more and more comfortable with the idea of thwarting the wishes of the elders and more and more adept at getting away with it, their reasons for cutting class got flimsier and flimsier, and eventually they dispensed with the need for a reason altogether. The simple glory of being free and available for the next unknown adventure, they eventually understood, was all the inducement they would ever need.

In this spirit they had gotten themselves into a fair amount of trouble, most of it never reported to their schoolteachers or their parents. There were so many children like them, so many who should have been in school and weren’t, that most of the adults who ran afoul of their wanderings simply gave them a cursory chase. If they scattered as they all invariably did, the adult usually considered that a victory and went back to their business. There weren’t enough truant officers left in the city to effectively deal with the situation anyway, so as long as the children kept out their sight, each individual merchant, laborer, or newspaperman considered the situation someone else’s problem.

But compared to all the adventures they previously had, all the interesting things they had seen and games they had played, this morning had promised to be something special. The granddaddy of all rumors had been circulating in the streets of Columbia for a month now, that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had marched his army of 60,000 combat veterans through the heartland of Georgia—burning Atlanta, capturing Savannah, and destroying everything of value in between—had turned his column north into South Carolina, and was bearing down inexorably on their fair capitol city. It had started as speculative whispers in the barber shops and sitting rooms, and had grown steadily in proponents and general acceptance until it had reached a near fever pitch, an absolute certainty that had some people hiding their valuables and others leaving the city. And yesterday came news that men in blue uniforms—the Enemy—had been spotted on the roads south of town, and would almost certainly be within Columbia the next day or the day following.

Tommy clearly remembered the conversation he had had with his friends about it the previous day.

“The bluebellies are coming for sure,” he had told them, reporting the news as he understood it. “Mister Jacobson saw them coming back from Gaston last night. They chased him and shot at him. If he hadn’t had his best team pulling the wagon, he wouldn’t have escaped with his life!”

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

On the Right Track

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So we had a great time at the WSAE meeting last week with Humanize authors Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant. In addition to the session they conducted for everyone, Notter and Grant also facilitated a private discussion with the association CEOs in attendance, which focused on the unique role that the staff executive has in changing and shaping the culture of any organization.

When it was my turn to summarize my thoughts on the subject, I said aloud what I had written in last week's post. That I was coming to see successful associations as those in which leadership and decision-making is not concentrated at the top, but diffused productively across many levels of the organization. And that given the ever-increasing need in our environment for nimbleness, innovation and new value creation, I believe this is one of the central challenges my organization is facing.

I'm not sure everyone in the room agreed with me, but no one challenged me, either. I didn't get the robust discussion I was hoping for, but the experience did get me thinking about the kinds of things I have been doing in my own organization to better diffuse leadership and decision-making across our hierarchical levels.

One thing I recently did, which some may think counter-intuitive, was to actually add some hierarchy to the organization. We are currently an organization of just over 11 FTEs, and until a few months ago we were an entirely flat organization. In other words, I am the CEO and I had nine direct reports. Not only did that keep me from focusing on some things that truly needed my attention, it brought every problem that needed solving to my desk, and kept the organization (and the people in it) from growing in some important dimensions.

So I created some departments and put one of my senior staff people in charge of each. They each have a staff team reporting to them, and the leaders report to me, forming with me what I have come to call my Executive Team. In that context, we work to stay aligned on the high-level strategy of our organization, and then I step out of the way and let them lead and manage the execution in each of their areas.

At least that's how it's supposed to work. When it does, it works really well and has visibly and meaningfully changed where certain decisions in the organization get made.

But, as I'm sure Notter and Grant would understand, things don't always work according to that plan in our very human organization. When those hurdles appear--miscommunication, misunderstanding, and misplaced trust the most common among them--I find myself working diligently to clear them, and am only sometimes successful in doing so.

But I find these struggles less an indictment against the decision I have made and more an expected part of the human unfolding of change within any organization. And I choose to believe that if things are continuing to trend towards diffusion of leadership and decision-making, then the track, regardless of any natural bumps we may feel along the way, is the undoubtedly the right one.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Takeaways from Humainze

WSAE is hosting an education session in Green Bay this Monday and Tuesday, and our speakers are the co-authors of Humanize, Jamie Notter and Maddie Grant. In preparing for the session, I decided to go back and review the blog posts I wrote that summarized some of my major takeaways from the book. They include:

Stop Calling It Strategic Planning
Inspired by a take-down of strategic planning in Humanize, I pledge to stop using that term to describe the messy, constantly evolving process my association uses to determine our direction and set our objectives. In laying out the guidelines that govern our activities, I realize that only one term makes any sense--association management.

Pockets of Chaos
Arguing that human-centric organizations are decentralized, Humanize presents the concept of “pockets of chaos,” where a leader figures out how to give the maximum freedom to specific pockets within his organization, while still being able to maintain the integrity of the enterprise. It resonates strongly with me, not just as a counter to the many false arguments one hears against decentralization, but providing a constructive framework for bringing more experimentation into an organization.

Leadership Is a System Capacity
This is another essential concept behind decentralization—that leadership is not some personal characteristic or quality that exists in certain people, but it is better defined as the system’s capacity to shape its own future. Applying this concept to an association board of directors, I recognize anew that one of the most important functions of such a body is to ensure that the association has the capacity to serve its own interests for generations to come.

Every Organization Needs Two Values Statements
Humanize talks about being trustworthy, and there are several pages in there about the importance of having a values statement—a clear and transparent declaration of what actions, beliefs and assumptions your organization values. It was the inspiration that finally got me over my own hostility towards values statements (most of which are fake and wind-up undermining the very goals they were intended to achieve) and attempt to create a decidedly aspirational values statement for my own organization.

It’s safe to say that Humanize has had a positive effect on my thinking and on my leadership. Across all four of the blog posts I wrote, a central theme seems to dominate. It is the idea of an association in which leadership and decision-making is not concentrated at the top, but diffused productively across its many levels. Given the ever-increasing need in my environment for nimbleness, innovation and new value creation, I believe this is one of the central challenges my organization faces. And Humanize, if not a guidebook for charting those waters, certainly contains enough inspiration for me to begin tackling some of the tougher issues on my own.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Gettysburg by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen

I don’t understand why this book is called Gettysburg. It’s not about the Battle of Gettysburg. In this alternate history, in which Lee takes Longstreet’s advice to move around the Union’s left flank on July 2, 1863, and entrench somewhere between Gettysburg and Washington, the climactic battle that ensues takes place along a tiny tributary called Pipe Creek.

I guess the publisher figured a book called Pipe Creek wasn’t likely to sell as many copies as one called Gettysburg.

I also don’t like the melodramatic flourishes the authors include in their battle narratives.

Such as...

On the ground, in front of the gun he had just fired, was a rebel flag, a red Saint Andrew’s cross, torn to shreds, staff gone, a twitching body next to it, the flag bearer, the bottom half of his body nothing but a ghastly tangle of charred flesh that was still smoking from the blast.

One of Wiedrich’s gunners scrambled over the lunette and started to pick up the flag. The Reb feebly reached out, trying to hang onto the colors. The gunner stopped, knelt down by his side, and relinquished the flag, gently putting the colors back into the hands of the dying boy. The gunner cupped his hands around the Confederate’s, leaned over, whispering something. The eyes of the dying boy shifted, looking up at the gunner. He started to say something, lips moving. Henry heard to words drifting as the two spoke together.

“‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures...’”

The boy shook convulsively and then was still.

The gunner closed the Reb’s eyes and then gently pried the bloody fingers loose.

He picked up the flag. There was no triumphal waving of it. The men of the battery stood silent, staring at him. The gunner came back over the lunette, tears streaming down his blackened face.

And…

Quinn knelt up again. “Those of you around me!” he shouted. “I’m making a run for the woods straight ahead. Any of you with some guts, come with me. The rest of you, well, you can go to hell!”

Making the sign of the cross, he took a deep breath, stood up, and started forward at a run. From the corner of his eye, he saw a dozen or more men stand up, going forward with him.

And, perhaps most unbelievable of all…

Along the far slope, twelve hundred yards away, men were up and out of the trench. A teenage boy from North Carolina, one of the “pets” of the company, disemboweled by a fragment, was surrounded by weeping comrades as he penned a farewell note to his mother with trembling hand, then accepted the draught of morphine from a doctor who knew the amount he was giving to him was not murder, but a merciful blessing.

It’s almost as if the authors were describing Norman Rockwell paintings.

What am I supposed to think when presented with characters who do these things? Is my heart supposed to swell with patriotism and pride? Am I supposed to marvel at how sublimely horrible war can be? Or am I meant to rage against the injustice that would bring such fanciful situations about?

I’m not sure. But apparently, I’m not the only one who is meant to be affected by these scenes of heroic fatalism. Here is some internal dialogue given to the novel’s fictionalized version of the Robert E. Lee, just after he learns of the death of Union General John Reynolds.

John, I’m sorry. This war never should have divided us. Duty, you and I lived for duty. We learned that at the Point, taught it to our cadets in turn. We were trained for this, believed it to be our sacred trust. A soldier must not ask why once he has drawn his sword for his nation. He takes his orders and carries them out unflinchingly; thus it was with the Roman Republic, with the Crusaders, with my own father who rode with Washington.

The Roman Republic, the Crusades, the American Revolutionary War. An interesting triptych. Makes me wonder how many fewer would have died if there had been few less unquestioning soldiers in each. But I digress. Back to Lee.

But...am I now responsible for all this death? For John, for the bodies that are swelling in the fields around me?

He slowed, suppressing a gag as they edged around a dead horse that had been nearly cut in half by a bursting shell, the broken body of a man twisted up in the offal.

“Lieutenant Jenson, find some men, get that poor man out of that mess, and have then drag the horse off the road. I don’t want troops seeing that.”

Of course not. A man twisted up in the burst internal organs of a dying horse. That’s not something Rockwell would have painted.

If I start thinking of this now, dwelling on all that this means, it will slow me, make me hesitate. One gets lost in it, the sight of a column of men, buoyant, filled with youthful zeal, marching along the road on a spring morning, their voices rising with the wind, a vast ocean sweeping toward victory, or the lines going forward, the first shock of battle joined, the air splitting with thunder...those are the moments we give ourselves over to the dark god.

Yes, that’s better. That will stir the blood and send it coursing through a patriot’s veins. But what’s this last bit about a dark god? Does Lee understand how faulty that vision can be? How much it lies to us?

The duality of man is so apparent then, men like myself who kneel in prayer to the Prince of Peace, who then rise up and go forth, open-eyed, into the red field, filled with mad passion for war and glorying in the moment. It is now, though, that we see the truth in what we do in this darkness before dawn.

No.

And he visibly shook himself, as if trying to cast off a weight upon his shoulders.

Not now. Long after this day is over I can dwell on my sins. I must stay the course with all my strength; to do otherwise is a betrayal of all who have already lost their lives, leading us to this moment.

He does, he does understand--both in life and in the fiction that the authors have created. But it is such a twisted logic. We must allow more to be killed so we don’t have to face the souls of those who have already died.

It is the Norman Rockwell picture of war that enables this kind of interpretation, the sense that war--as awful as it is--swells the heart and allows for the finest example of valor and courage. Whether it is subtly placed in the mind of a commander or less artfully forced into the flow of a narrative, the shocking embrace of the perceived holy amidst a totality of mindless carnage damages both our history and the fictions on which it is based.

And it kept me from enjoying what might otherwise have been a delightful read.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.