The big buzz from the American Society of Association Executives and The Center for Association Leadership at its 2006 Annual Meeting and Exposition, held August 19 to 22 at the Boston Convention and Exposition Center, was the release of 7 Measures of Success: What Remarkable Associations Do That Others Don't. The project, based on methodology developed by Jim Collins, author of the books Built to Last and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't, was the result of “thousands of hours spent by volunteer leaders,” said Susan Sarfati, CAE, president and CEO of The Center for Association Leadership at a press conference during the meeting. Sarfati also serves as executive vice president of ASAE and The Center. “ASAE was the first association to apply Jim Collins' research methodology to a nonprofit,” she said, adding that the book outlining the results of the research had sold out at the ASAE and the Center bookstore within the first two days of the conference. “He called us chimps, because we are bright and inquisitive, and called our meetings chimposeums, which brought a lot of fun to the process.” The Radiological Society of North America, Oak Brook, Ill.; the American College of Cardiology, Bethesda, Md.; and the American Dental Association, Chicago, are cited in the book.

The seven measures of success that resulted from the project are:

  1. Customer-service culture: Everything should be structured around assessing and fulfilling members' needs.

  2. Alignment of products and services with an organization's mission.

  3. Data-driven strategies.

  4. Dialogue and engagement: Have a culture in which all staff equally share the responsibility to contribute and add value to the organization.

  5. The CEO must be the broker of ideas: He or she must help foster visionary thinking in all staff members.

  6. Organizational adaptability: The association must be able to shift gears quickly and learn from experience.

  7. Alliance building: It's important to be able to build alliances that relate to existing strategies, and to be willing to walk away when an alliance isn't producing good results for both partners.

Boston: A Good Fit

Officials from both ASAE and The Center for Association Leadership and the City of Boston appeared to be pleased with the turnout at the annual meeting. Attendance reached approximately 6,000 (final numbers were not available at press time), beating last year's 5,300 total attendance at ASAE and the Center's conference in Nashville, Tenn. Officials said it was the second-highest executive attendance in the history of the meeting, only a few hundred executives short of the record set at the 1995 annual meeting held in Washington, D.C.

At the press conference, Patrick Moscaritolo, president and CEO, Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the city was glad to have ASAE and the Center in town, not just for the more than $14 million in immediate revenue its attendees had brought to Boston, but also for the “spending impact in terms of meetings and trade shows that will come in the future now that they've seen our new convention center.” The association calculates its meeting will generate about $1.4 billion in future convention business for the city.

Both Jim Rooney, the executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, and John Graham, president and CEO of ASAE and the Center, emphasized that it's more than just the BCEC that contributed to the success of the conference. “No one's going to make a decision to come to a city because of a building,” said Rooney. Graham added, “It takes teamwork and partnership to make this conference come together.”

To take advantage of the destination as a whole, ASAE and the Center planned numerous events, including the Club Energy after-hours party, an evening with the Blue Man Group, a fisherman's feast in Boston's North End, a Boston Irish and heritage brewery tour, a Boston Music Bash, a dine-around that coincided with Boston's Restaurant Week celebration, and a final evening concert by the Boston Pops at the Bank of America Pavilion.

The conference was not without its challenges, however. A tunnel problem with the Big Dig project caused some traffic snarls for those traveling to and from the airport, and the foiled terror plot against U.K. planes flying to U.S. cities that included Boston added some last-minute headaches for travelers. Neither of those problems is expected to continue long-term.

Attendees also complained about the time it took to travel from the hotels to the BCEC. While the association had 25 contracted hotels to accommodate attendees, Graham said that 90 percent stayed in just five of those hotels, including the new 793-room Westin Boston Waterfront that is attached to the BCEC. The 424-room InterContinental Boston Hotel is scheduled to open in November, and the 471-room Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel also is scheduled to open by fall 2007; several other hotels either have opened recently or will be added to the city's inventory in 2007.

In Other ASAE News:

Six associations received the 2006 Summit Award for implementing innovative community-based programs, the majority of which were related to efforts undertaken after Hurricane Katrina last year. Among them were the Allergy and Asthma Network Mothers of Asthmatics and the American Counseling Association.