Earlier this month I was engaged in a classic conflict with my wife, Martha. A conflict familiar to any spouse or roommate. With a broken “mechanical” dishwasher, both of us were gradually adding our dirty dishes to a pile in the sink – implicitly determining who the human dishwasher was going to be. Now, dear reader, we all know how this resolves itself. Whomever places a dish that causes the pile to collapse, does the dishes. For 2 days we engaged in a battle of wills, physics, and dare I say it resilience. Amid this marital contest, I finally asked myself, Mr. West (it was a formal conversation), “Are you resilient or are you just too stupid to quit”. Over the last few months, I’ve been impressed by peoples’ abilities to keep moving forward regardless of all the obstacles they face. They refuse to stop – kinda like the

Last month was my celebration of “Rantmas” in Death by Unanimous Decision – decrying the slow decision-making that will mark the end of so many associations. This month let’s pretend that everything will be awesome, Awesome, AWESOME!! despite the evidence and talk about Inspiration. See I can be positive and hopeful. 😊 Make sure to read to the end (promise you won’t skip) for insightful, impactful, hard charging bonus content. Oh, to be inspired. As the great actor Audrey Hepburn once said,  “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’m possible!’” Every year at some point, all of us must reenergize, forget the past, and find the inspiration to keep pursing personal, professional, or organizational goals. But inspiration finding doesn’t come easy. The search for inspiration is a long, arduous road filled with inspirational speakers. I hate inspirational speakers. Here is a summary of every inspirational speaker ever. “I

This June, I sat outside on the patio, enjoying the results of my good decisions. Everything looked fine. The flowers were flowering. The birds were singing. The deer were deering. You would never have thought, that in a few short months, much of what I was enjoying would be dead. Today, in November, that same ground is brown. The leaves have turned and dopped. The flowers withered and dried. The deer stand fat and happy after eating at my delicious deer buffet. Stupid fat deer. Think they’re so big. As I grow contemplative towards the year’s end, I am afraid that today, we sit happily running our associations and organizations, enjoying the flowers and birds, but with withering death just around the corner. The reason? Association governance, decision-making, and decision-makers are not adapting to the harsh realities of our new world. Let me explain. No, we don’t have time.

I’m not lazy, I’m providing opportunities for others to share their voice. LOL This month’s blog takeover is by Nikki Haton Shanks. While she’s one of our strategists and an acknowledged industry leader in the association sector, more importantly, she and her husband run Troubled Waters Brewery near Tampa, FL. Unlike me, she doesn’t learn lessons from drinking booze, but from making it. Here’s some lessons learned and some takeaways for our association (and other) colleagues. Take it away, Nikki. My husband owns a brewery (Troubled Waters Brewing in Safety Harbor, FL) and is a Certified Cicerone (kind of like the Sommelier of the beer world). Being married to a brewer is fun and interesting. There have been days I’ve walked into the house and he’s toasting trays full of coconut in the oven for a new chocolate stout recipe or jalapeños for a new IPA with mango. His

Welcome one and welcome all. Like many of you, I often want to work less, do less, be less. This month, two of our awesome strategists Nikki Golden and Nikki Haton Shanks approached me with an idea. “What if we wrote a guest blog from My Seat at the Bar, would that be OK?”. Being a kind and generous blogger, I jumped at the chance to not do any work. You see, unlike me, Nikki and Nikki, or the Nikkis, as they’re affectionately known, have been thinking about the lessons learned (or forgotten?) on how to bring people together. We call this a convening strategy and the people, of course, conveners. Enjoy this month’s guest Blog and 5 great lessons on how to bring people together more effectively. From The Nikkis I (Nikki G) think about gathering a lot. And not just because I just had my kitchen remodeled

The other day, while enjoying the sweet, juicy fruit of success, I had an epiphany. Perhaps, just maybe, something other than my unique combination of skills had contributed to my success. Wait, stay with me. Take a deep breath. Was it possible, I had been helped along the way? Had unseen mechanisms supported me all along? The great good consultant in me looked at this notion in more detail. What was the nature of this unseen support? What I saw was my leadership infrastructure. Leadership infrastructure is the Spanx that supports you and allows you to accomplish whatever it is you think you need to accomplish. Like Spanx, it is an invisible professional undergarment that makes you look and perform better. Building and maintaining your personal leadership Spanx is critical to your success. You don’t want to experience the unsightly sagginess of failure. When I stopped thinking about underwear

Recently, I was taking a break from thought leadering when I remembered a recent conversation at a client gig in Napa. A person I had just met, asked me if I traveled a lot. My response began with, “Well I used to travel all the time but then, ya know, the spicy cough, but now I’m nearly back to pre-pandemic travel.” I realized in virtually every conversation, there was a time gap that needed to be explained. Kinda like a lost time period on your resume when you didn’t have a job and were too embarrassed to put prison gap year. It dawned on me that every conversation with a new person included a pre-pandemic, pandemic, and post pandemic narrative. The post pandemic story always described how I and my life were different. When I listened to others, commoner, and equal alike, I heard the same thing. “I used

This last weekend, I finally found time to catch up on my reading. You know, perusing the stack of mags next to your chair. The stuff we say we’ll read but never seem to find an opportunity. Sitting contentedly in the sun coming through my living room window, I had an epiphany. I’d been engrossed in a magazine I was reading. I’d read stories about the history of the organization. I’d read stories about member successes. I’d even read an in-depth article linking the science of their Mission to their advocacy agenda in DC. The organization? Pheasants Forever (PF). Pheasants Forever is a conservation organization. Founded in 1982 by a group of pheasant hunters that “saw the connection between upland habitat loss and declining pheasant populations”. Today, according to their website, they have 130,000 members in forty states. The have approximately 750 local chapters. Too often we look to

One of my many blog readers or “bleaders” as I call them, suggested I talk about how the Pandemic might have changed our view on relationships. What has been the impact of lockdowns and quarantines on our relationships? Are work colleagues less or more interesting on Zoom? Why do girls think I’m more attractive when I’m wearing a mask? Well, I’ve been a consultant for more than 3 decades and I’ve learned not just a thing, but a thing or two. Here’s my advice. Your relationships are not defined by your communication channel. Is your mom somehow less of your mom if you talk to her by Zoom instead of seeing her in person? No. So why do you think your other personal or business relationships are different due to online interaction as opposed to face-to-face contact. The Pandemic hasn’t changed our relationships, it’s simply pushed us from one