...to make the awards, announcements, and congratulations to new certification holders more interesting. There has to be. But this morning's opening session wasn't it. I do like the way they're doing little snapshot interviews with various members, be they award winners this morning or people talking about diversity yesterday. But the running of the new CAE's was almost as much fun as watching my stepdaughter's college graduation ceremony (and seemed to take almost as long). I guess if there was a way, someone would have found it by now, but I kept on wishing I had just slept in and missed the whole thing.
But then I would have missed Susan Sarfati's farewell and the standing ovation she got (yes, I got a tear in my eye, and I wasn't the only one). And Rohit Talwar's really interesting overview of the 10 trends detailed in, well, a lot more detail in Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges, and Choices Facing Associations and Nonprofit Leaders, a study now available from ASAE and The Center.
He had to really fly through them to keep it within the time constraints, but it was fascinating to see how he linked current and future association imperatives to changes in demographics, economics (micro/personal and macro), politics, business agendas, science and technology, the generational makeup of the workplace, how we look at training and education, global Internet expansion, a society in transition, and natural resource challenges.
He definitely whet my appetite for the full monty, so I guess I'll be buying the book to see if I can parse out what it all might mean for meetings, as well as the associations that hold them. Just in the time he was talking, my mind kept spinning out how these things all interconnect, intersect, and will change as much about how we meet as they do how associations function as a whole. Interesting times ahead, I think.