Leadership trends for 2010

Bloomberg BusinessWeek.com and Hay Group conducted their Best Companies for Leadership survey, which revealed two key results:

• "The Top 20 companies this year are significantly more likely to be primarily focused on 'positioning for the future' than other companies.The behavior of these companies indicates they believe the recession is over.


• In last year's program, the quality that the Top 20 companies valued most in their leaders was execution—the ability of leaders to achieve results through others. This year, the most valued quality is strategic thinking."

Other trends for 2010 are around expanding roles for women and the advantages of social responsibility. Read the article here

Author Rick Lash states, "If your business isn't looking ahead, you're already behind."

Take a look at the association of the future as we inspect, innovate, and integrate great ideas and technologies at DigitalNow 2010.

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Operational effectiveness is not a strategy

2009 found all of us tightening our belts, "reallocating" resources, and finding inventive ways to do more with less. We had to; it was a matter of survival during a crisis. By now, you're probably operating pretty close to the bone, so if there's nothing left to cut, where do you go from here?

A recent article by Tim Laseter at Strategy-Business.com suggests that the answer is to shift focus from operational efficiencies to operational strategy.

Quoting author Michael Porter, Laseter offers this definition of strategy: Strategy is " 'the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.' He also noted that 'strategy is making trade-offs in competing' — including 'choosing what not to do.' Finally, he emphasized the importance of fit among a company’s activities: 'The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well — not just a few — and integrating among them.' "

Laseter states that, "An operations strategy should guide the structural decisions and the evolution of operational capabilities needed to achieve the desired competitive position of the company as a whole" and in the article (free registration required for access) he goes on to list and discuss key structural decisions as well as operational capabilities.


Three key competencies for association leaders in today's marketplace include the ability to inspect, to innovate, and to integrate. Join us at DigitalNow as we present thought leaders and case studies to help you place these critical competencies into the framework of your association.

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Registration now open for DigitalNow 2010 - April 7-10 at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

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Ten management non-practices

Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive. BusinessWeek.com recently published her Ten Management Practices to Axe. Among them is this antiquated social media policy point:


"Social Media Thought Police: It's reasonable to block Youtube (GOOG) in the office because of the bandwidth it consumes. The recent e-mail message I received from a worker who'd just been informed of her employer's 'no LinkedIn profiles permitted' policy sets a new low for organizational paranoia. Memo to your general counsel: Human beings work in your business, not robots or replicants. People have lives, brands, and connections beyond your walls, and those human entanglements are more likely to help your business than to hurt it. What to do instead: Treat people like babies only if you want them to act like babies. Let the rest of them update their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts appropriately, and if they're not getting their work done, deal with that problem on its own."


Read Ryan's other nine "brainless and injurious" management practices here.


How does our changing culture affect the way you manage? Join us at DigitalNow and participate in discussions initiated by keynote Emmanuel Gobillot, author of the book, Leadershift: Reinventing leadership for the age of mass collaboration.

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Registration now open for DigitalNow 2010 - April 7-10 at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

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Why innovate?

Everyone's talking about innovation as a core competency for excellence in leadership. But why? It almost seems moot to ask, but have you asked yourself, "Why do I care about innovation?"

At Blogging Innovation, authors Robert F. Brands and Jeff Zbar make no bones about it: Successful innovation turns ideas into money.

Some ways in which innovation may add value include:

• "Enhancing the business model;


• Networking;


• Enabling a new core process;


• Creating a new channel, brand or customer experience delivery model;


• Offering a new product system, boosting product performance, or providing a new service."

The key to successful innovation? Finding the "balance between cost, price, and return. Balance is found, in part, by seeking stakeholder input and customer feedback during development..." Read the article here.

At DigitalNow 2010, we are presenting speakers and workshops to help you identify your opportunities for innovation and develop processes for successful implementation.

DigitalNow 2010: Inspect, Innovate, Integrate. Are you IN³?

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Registration now open for DigitalNow 2010 - April 7-10 at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

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Keep it clean: Your reputation in 2010

James O’Brien, director of marketing with e-mail compliance company LashBack, says that there will be several "hot-button" issues regarding e-mail reputation in 2010.

Here are four reputation-related issues you may need to address this year:

1. Your privacy policy: Making your policy available when people first subscribe to your emails may not be enough; you should also be notifying all subscribers whenever you implement a policy change.


2. The disposability of data: If your subscribers go for long periods of time without interacting with you, their data will quickly become obsolete. When it does, it will need to be purged. Continuing to send new messages to dormant or unwelcoming addresses can increase complaints, and impact performance data regarding bounce rates, unsubscribe requests, etc.


3. The increased importance of unsubscribes: Give subscribers the option of opting out by message type so they can choose to discontinue messages they don't want without completely severing ties.


4. The return of address book requests: Asking your subscribers to make sure that your domain is added to their safe list is an "oldie but a goody" when it comes to email marketing practices.

Learn more about keeping your email marketing reputation clean in 2010 by reading this article at BtoBonline.com.

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Dot-to-dot thinking

President Obama has commented that the "counterterrorism community" as a whole failed "to connect the dots of intelligence" that would have prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a plane to Detroit on Christmas Day.

"Connecting the dots" may well become the newest catch phrase, right along with "design thinking."

SmartBrief recently conducted a poll, which asked, "In your organization, what prevents people from 'connecting the dots' with important information?

Here are the results and commentary from a research consultant:

• Corporate silos blocking information flow 33.46%


• Unwillingness to speak truth to power 25.24%


• No direct responsibility/'not my problem' attitude 19.94%


• Poor listening/unwillingness to hear bad news 11.28%


• Political correctness 6.12%


• Paucity of information 3.96%"

Join us at DigitalNow 2010 and learn to inspect, innovate, and integrate to connect the dots in your organization.

Registration now open for DigitalNow 2010 - April 7-10 at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

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Latest statistics on Internet use from Pew Internet

Here are some of the latest statistics on Internet use according to PewInternet.org:

• 94% of teens aged 12-17 go online


• 58% of 12-year-olds have a cell phone, up from 18% just five years ago


• Of those teens who are online, 73% of them are engaged in social networking, compared to 18% three years ago


• 93% of 18-29-year-olds have a cell phone, and 93% go online


• 47% of adults use social media, up 10% from a year ago

All statistics are taken from the report, Social Media and Young Adults, conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project.

At DigitalNow 2010, we'll be discussing trends in Internet behavior, and exploring how those trends inspire innovations in member and revenue models.

Registration now open for DigitalNow 2010 - April 7-10 at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

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Do you have a social media policy?

It's a fact of modern-day life: social media is all around and everywhere. The issue is not whether you will accept it, but rather how you will respond to it.

By now, most of you have likely heard some of the social media horror stories as well as the success stories. So how can you minimize the chance that you'll experience the former and maximize the chance that you'll experience the latter? One way is to develop and communicate a social media policy within your organization.

To help get you started Kodak, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard have gone public with their own policies. Read this article to find out how you can download those policies, and then use them to help guide you in your decisions regarding what will work best for your organization.

Discussion questions:

• Do you currently have a social media policy?

• What do you believe are the most critical issues that a written policy will aid in addressing?

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Registration now open for DigitalNow 2010 - April 7-10 at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

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Design Thinking as a Path to Innovation

The term "design thinking" was coined by David Kelley of IDEO and it refers to a set of principles that can be applied to solve complex problems. According to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, "Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as being functional, and to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols."

Rather then a sequence of orderly steps, the design thinking process is a system of "spaces": Inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Read the article for an example of effective design thinking in action.

At DigitalNow 2010, our focus is on "Inspect, Innovate, Integrate," and we are presenting keynote speakers, panels, and educational sessions dedicated to providing you with the tools you need to solve the complex problems of your association.

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Registration now open for DigitalNow 2010 - April 7-10 at Disney's Contemporary Resort.

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Contribute to the DigitalNow blog. Suggest a blog topic, or reference an article or other item you think would be of interest to the DigitalNow community. Drop us a line at DigitalNow@fusionproductions.com