CEO Solutions :: KST Consulting

Use SUCCESS to get your message heard! How can you get your ideas and messages across when everyone is bombarded daily with hundreds of “inputs”?

The acronym SUCCESS derives from the book, MADE TO STICK: Why Some Ideas Do & Others Don’t by Chip Health and Dan Heath. It’s chock full of stories, examples of urban legends and why they persist. They tell how you can best get your ideas across by finding the core of your idea–its most critical essence. They share why you can’t have “Five North Stars”–just one. Makes sense, right? We often ignore that wisdom and confuse others with a list of several major goals or ideas.

They quote French aviator and author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery who defined engineering elegance as: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Brilliant! How often do we keep piling it on?

Make an idea sticky according to the Heath brothers by following SUCCESS:

Simplicity, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story Sticks!

Make people:

1. Pay attention
2. Understand and remember it
3. Agree/believe
4. Care, FEEL something (fear, anger, hope, excitement…)
5. Be able to act on it

What idea do you want to share? How can you get others to understand, remember and care? What story can you tell to make it stick? Will others be able to act on it?

STICK this post someplace as a daily reminder. Review it before you communicate!

For more information, read the book.

It’s US Census time!  Completing the census form prompted me to do a bit of personal reflection on how my personal and professional life has changed markedly in the past ten years. In fact, my life has been transformed. I am:

•  enjoying a different career as an association consultant after 35 years working inside associations,
•  married to a different man,
• grandmother to four children,
• live in a different home,
• a blond instead of brunnette (gray doesn’t fit my self image!)

just to list a few of the changes my life has undergone in the past 10 years. How has your life changed?

Better yet, what do you think has changed in your organization? How have your members changed? How have the demographics of your membership changed? What new programs/services are you offering and how are they being delivered differently? If you haven’t carefully considered these questions very recently, it is time to take a Census for your Organization.

I recommend you do it annually rather than waiting ten years. In fact, you need to keep in touch with the pulse of changes in your organization constantly with significant assessment periodically. So much can dramatically change in so little time that it is not enough to tweak your offerings, you may need a significant overhaul to your value proposition and how it is delivered.  You may need to be on a path of transformation through reinvention and innovation just as I have been personally and professionally for the past ten years. The changes I made didn’t all happen overnight or all at once. It was a progression of events and choices that resulted in my current life. Most of them occurred within a five to seven year timeframe.

A few things to think about:

• How will you attract and retain young professionals (millenials/Gen Y born 1977 and beyond) to engage them as future contributing members?
• How are you integrating social media into your marketing and communications initiatives if you haven’t already and are you gearin up for more changes in the social media environment?
• Are you successfully meeting and exceeding the expectations of four or more generations of culturally diverse members and staff?
• Do you engage in global initiatives? If not, are you missing opportunities?
• What language does your staff need to speak–English, Spanish, French, Chinese, other?
• What are your core business hours in a 24/7 world? Do you offer flexible schedules for staff? Operate up  from virtual offices?
• What needs to change, what needs to stay the same, what needs to be stopped so you can be the “go to resource” for your market five and ten years from now with a talented and engaged staff and cadre of volunteer leaders?

These are just a few questions that I encourage you to talk about with your stakeholders. What is your self image for the future and how will you achieve it?

Wishing you successful transformation in the next ten years, Karen