Now is the time for disruptive reinvention
April 20th, 2009
It’s important to understand that the revolution taking place in our society didn’t just materialize overnight. The forces driving it have been building for decades, and our current economic travails are only exacerbating the already painful effects of this paradigm shift, while also accelerating the pace at which leaders and organizations are being forced to confront the failures of legacy structures and toxic assets.
But here is the problem: there are still far too many leaders in the association community who are unable to accept that their organizations will make it to the next trajectory of success only as a result of disruptive reinvention.
In a time of revolution, when traditional assumptions no longer apply, ordinary strategic thinking is rendered utterly meaningless. As the rules of the game change, sustainable value creation will not emerge from another iteration of increasingly commoditized products and services. It is necessary to reimagine the entire underlying economic model, and it is the responsibility of leaders to recognize and capitalize on this structural break.
Unfortunately, there are no obvious and risk-free approaches for reinventing associations in the 21st century. Leaders, therefore, must act wisely to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, while carefully identifying and implementing disruptive strategies that radically alter the organization’s usual ways of doing business. Here are three questions leaders can ask to get this process started:
+What is the most complex and intractable problem our members face today and what have we been unwilling to do to help them solve it, at least until now?
+How can we innovate our business model to connect the building of new social capital with the creation of new economic value?
+How can we become lightweight, i.e., capable of creating maximum value with minimal infrastructure and bureaucracy?
Disruptive reinvention will unleash challenging conversations and demand difficult decisions. Now is the time for association leaders to start having those conversations, and start making those decisions. There is no more time to wait.
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Entry Filed under: Principled Innovation Blog, What's New?, Social Media, Innovation, Associations, Extreme Makeover, The Association Innovator, We Have Always Done It That Way, PI Services, PI Events, Garage Memes, Governing for Innovation, Embrace the Revolution
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Association exec Ben Martin, CAE is P.I.’s Architect of Participation. Jeff and Ben help clients harness the power of the Web through the strategic application of social tools.
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