Connecting to the Meaningful Outside
The Energy of Many
By Bruce MacMillan, C.A.
BY THE TIME THIS COLUMN HITS YOUR DESK OR SCREEN, your chapter leaders—and those of us supporting them in Dallas—will be wrapping up perhaps the most complicated planning and budgeting cycle this association executive has ever participated in.
As we all know too well, the annual planning ritual in which every business owner and enterprise leader immerses themselves runs the full emotional gamut—going from frustration to exhilaration—eventually ending up at place of professional self-actualization where the feeling of completion is akin to solving a Rubik’s Cube. (I never did solve that damned multicolored piece of plastic.)
The juice that powers a typical organizational planning process—data, both internal and external—has never been as accessible to an enterprise as it is today. At MPI, we have never had as much data to support our chapter leaders as we do now: member and chapter satisfaction data, financial performance data and, of course, industry economic data starting with our own bi-monthly American Express Business Barometer. We have fuel for endless spreadsheets and presentation decks.
But maybe it’s in the depth and breadth of our insatiable desire for a data equivalent of a Rosetta Stone for today’s unstable environment that we actually over-engineer the planning process and inhibit ourselves from getting to the actual job at hand—leading, managing. After all, how can you ever have enough data to be ready for a volcanic eruption, yet another national financial bailout, a catastrophic oil spill or an emerging political coup? All of which hit the global enterprise planning radar screen over the past two months.
I’m not saying discard your attention to data by any means. You do that at your peril. But what I am saying is that in looking at your business, your department or your portfolio of clients or events, don’t let an ocean of data drown you from crystallizing your own perspective at the expense of undertaking your own personal explorations. Data informs decisions. It’s human connections that inspire action.
Last year, I viewed a great May 2009 Harvard Business Review video (“What Only the CEO Can Do”) by former Proctor and Gamble Chairman A.G. Lafley, who explained that the primary role of an organizational leader is to be connected to “the Meaningful Outside.” As rich as all the data leaders currently have at their disposal is, nothing is as valuable today as the experience and insight gained from the human connections to that “Meaningful Outside.” It’s there that leaders find the inspiration for the performance results our stakeholders desire. It’s an ironic paradox that the more you personally connect to the chaos that surrounds the meaningful outside that are our businesses these days, the more likely you’ll find a breakthrough idea or insight that will make sense of it all.
And don't you just love it when a plan comes together? One+
BRUCE MACMILLAN, C.A., is CEO and president of MPI. He can be reached at bmacmillan@mpiweb.com. Follow him at www.twitter.com/BMACMPI.