Last week Jeffrey Cufaude wrote a post about a struggle he was having–a struggle with being one of four totally awesome people selected for a conference panel who all happened to be white. He struggled because it seems like the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the diversity in our community, but we were putting forward four [...]
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I was at a gathering of association folks on Monday, and the topic turned to generational differences. I was all excited to share some of the knowledge that I have on that topic (by the way, I have recently priced my Generations book more appropriately as an e-book–$2.49), but it turned out the real issue [...]
Continue ReadingI've been working on the book (shocker!) and one of the sections I've been working on lately has to do with authenticity. Human organizations love authenticity. It's part of what makes them trustworthy. They love it when their employees fly their own individual freak flags, actually, to follow up on my post earlier this month. [...]
Continue ReadingLast week Elizabeth Engel put up a very short post about a new TED conference focused on women, expressing her displeasure with "ghettoizing" women by creating a separate conference. The post then became one of the most "comment-worthy" in the association space for a few days. Check out all the comments, because that's where the [...]
Continue ReadingI'm speaking next week for the Health Care Association of Michigan at their leadership conference. One of the sessions I'm doing is on the "mindsets" of 21st century leadership. Times have changed, and we need to re-examine how we understand and practice leadership in organizations. And awareness of what you want to do differently isn't [...]
Continue ReadingI noticed in my Google Analytics the other day that one of the most popular keywords for finding my blog is the phrase "what does respect look like." I did a brief post on that in October 2007, pointing out that when I facilitate, the group frequently asks for "treat each other with respect" as [...]
Continue ReadingThis was one of the most important learnings/insights that I took away from the ASAE & The Center Annual Meeting this year. It was a statement that my new favorite person, Patti Digh, made during the opening session on diversity. A lot of conversations about diversity focus on recruiting. We need more people of color [...]
Continue ReadingThe opening session of the ASAE Annual Meeting this year focused on diversity. They had a panel conversation with experts in the diversity field, and it was really exciting to see this conversation on that stage at this time. Although the conversation didn’t go quite as deep as I would have liked, it still put [...]
Continue ReadingThere is a good article in Sloan Management Review (Summer 2007—sorry, the reading has been piling up!) that talks about the challenges of managing diverse teams. According to the authors’ research, diverse teams naturally break into subgroups along demographic lines (any kind of demographic, French/American, male/female, engineering/marketing, etc.). If the divisions become too entrenched, then [...]
Continue ReadingI am glad to see that William Strauss and Neil Howe have an article about generations in the current Harvard Business Review. I’ve always felt their book, Generations, was the best on this topic—but it was also quite “old” (published in 1991). They hadn’t even named Generation X yet! They called it the “Thirteenth Generation” [...]
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Jamie is a Vice President at MSP where he leads the consulting division. 
