Archive for Leadership
Hurry and register!
Posted by: | CommentsThe 2010 ISA Spring Leaders Meeting (SLM) will soon be here! Register now for this must-attend leadership-training event.
Message from Dianna L. Noyes, ISA Administrator, Section and District Services
Date: 12-14 June 2010
Location: Summerlin, Nevada (Las Vegas).
Meeting Registration, Meeting Schedule, and Hotel Information: Click here. Please note that 21 May 2010 is the deadline to register.
The SLM will provide you with many tools you need to be a successful leader. Here are a few highlights of what to expect:
The ISA and the Web session, which includes information on using social media, has been expanded to three hours because of its popularity. Presenters Jon DiPietro and Shari Worthington will be back this year with more information to keep you up-to-date on how to use the web and other electronic media. These media can help you keep in contact with your Members, recruit new Members and leaders, and find new ways to grow your ISA Section.
The Section Leaders Roundtable, with Brad Rupert as facilitator, will surely have some lively discussions as participants share their successes and lessons they’ve learned. Programs, presentations, and promotions are just some of the topics to be shared in this pool of knowledge and experience.
Learn about ISA—the Society, the different technical Divisions, the benefits of membership, etc.—and your role and responsibilities as a leader. Presenters Peggie Koon, William Stange, and Joe Provenzano will lead the discussions about some of the key challenges and opportunities you might face as a leader. In addition, they and other presenters will share their personal experiences within the Society.
Come, join your fellow leaders for an enjoyable and interesting Spring Leaders Meeting. A great program has been prepared for you. Bring your questions, share your experiences, and get re-charged for the year. I look forward to seeing you!
Popularity: 9%
The ISA I Know
Posted by: | CommentsOver the last 7 years I have had the opportunity to be a part of some very good things through ISA; the development of the Certified Automation Professional (CAP) program, the development of the ANSI/ISA-18.2 standard on the Management of Alarm Systems in the Process Industries, and the new Applications in Automation Conference, among others. These three activities exemplify some of the great parts of my ISA experience. My conclusion: it really has been the case that the more you put in, the more you get out.
In the spring of 2003, in Memphis at my first ISA leaders meeting, I was looking for a program that we could use in my company to recognize process control competency. I talked with several leaders and was directed to Vernon Trevathan and Dale Lee. Vernon was pitching the Certified Automation Professional program to ISA leadership. We talked and later Vernon, an ISA Fellow and member of the Control magazine Control Hall of Fame, invited me to be a part of the CAP development team. There were many experienced professionals from many companies involved in meetings early in 2004. Many of us met again to write test questions for the exam, and still more met to assemble the exam from the questions. By the fall of 2004 there was a certification program for Automation Professionals, following the ANSI/ISO/IEC standard. Several of us from the development team became CAPs.
It was an impressive effort, funded by the new venture investment program at ISA. It took some time for the ideas to be formulated and reformulated, but with the incredible passion of Vernon, and the support of many ISA leaders, a new certification program was launched. Since that launch, the CAP program has steadily gained acceptance, albeit more slowly than hoped. Still the related training and books has are in high demand, so the evidence indicates a good level of interest.
I extracted some lessons from the experience, not necessarily new, but still lessons.
- One person can make a difference. Without the passion and energy of Vernon Trevathan there would be no CAP program.
- Together we are much smarter than we are alone. No one person had all the answers during the program development.
- People don’t always want what they ask for. A survey showed 80% of respondents would be interested in getting CAP. The numbers show far fewer actually have applied.
- Success (genius) is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It takes work to make ideas reality. Without the work, the ideas mean nothing.
In the fall of 2003, at my second ISA leaders meeting, Vic Maggioli, then VP of the ISA Standards and Practices Department, asked me to get involved with the ISA-18 standard committee and help get a new standard written. At the short committee meeting we approved a scope and then went forth to built the team that could write the standard. It took 6 months to get much of the committee collected. It took almost 2 years to get the work processes down and the first real draft. It took another 2.5 years to get to the standard to the ballot stage and then another 6 months to work that process through to approval. In the end a committee ~90 people, with ~40 active members and ~25 voting members submitted and addressed ~8000 comments. Conservatively, it took over 10 person years to produce ANSI/ISA-18.2-2009 Management of Alarm Systems for the Process Industries. I think it will have a very positive impact on industry.
Co-chairing ISA-18 with Donald Dunn has been one of the greatest learning experiences of my life. Along the way I learned quite a bit about how alarms are used in different companies and industries, and how standards are written and edited, but mostly about how to work with people. Every person brought their own views and biases, including me. Some came with a bias that their view was always right. Then, we got to know each other and began to appreciate the views of others. That led to consensus, and in the end, to a standard. It is not perfect, but it is quite good I think.
Again I extracted some lessons from the experience.
- A few people can make a difference. Without the passion and energy of the core group, there would be no ISA-18.2 standard.
- Together we are much smarter than we are alone. No one person had all the answers during the standard development.
- Success (genius) is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It takes work to make ideas reality. Without the work, the ideas mean nothing.
Though I have had the opportunity to be part of many ISA teams that have completed many projects over those 7 years, the last example I wanted to share is one that has me excited today, the ISA Mid-Atlantic Applications in Automation conference (www.isatechcon.eventbrite.com ). The Applications in Automation conference is a small technical conference born of the desire for local talent to share their knowledge and experience with local people. This 3-day event in Wilmington, DE, March 23-25, features 2 days of training with a technical conference on the middle day. The conference committee consists of members of the local sections and requires no support from ISA headquarters. We are very optimistic about the conference.
Leading this team of exceptional volunteers has been very exciting. Each person brings their own talents. Together we are able to do things we could never do alone. All it took to get some of these talented people to join the effort was the opportunity. They wanted to be a part of something like this. They only needed the opportunity. And it is fun.
From this experience I have again extracted a few lessons.
- A few people can make a difference. Without the passion and energy of the team, there would be no conference.
- Together we are much smarter than we are alone. No one person had all the ideas for this conference.
- Success (genius) is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It takes work to make ideas reality. Without the work, the ideas mean nothing.
These experiences at ISA, among others, are why I continue to volunteer my own time. I have found it very rewarding personally. It seems to me that there are very few limits on what you can do if you really put the time into it and you get a few people to work with you. There are people willing to work with you. I have no bone to pick, no wrong to right, no point to make, only some experience to share, and a few lessons I seem to learn again and again.
Popularity: 15%
Ideas Are Easy, Implementation Is Hard
Posted by: | Comments
Thus says entrepreneur and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki. As someone who has not only been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, Kawasaki also hears his share of pitches from would-be venture-back entrepreneurs. He has grown very weary of not only “Really Bad PowerPoint,” but what he regards as a delusion of almost all startups that the value is in their idea.
The old argument goes that if you have great people they will come up with great ideas. My perspective is different: If you have a great idea, then you can find great people to implement it.
Why am I posting this here on Our ISA?
I know that more than a few leaders are uncomfortable with discussing many of these topics in such a naked, vulnerable forum. And I get it. However, I think it’s important to consider a couple of things. First of all, it’s doubtful we’re going to unearth any ideas here that have not been contemplated or even attempted before. Indeed, its greatest value is probably found in identifying old ideas and strategies that have worked other contexts. Second, a great idea with bad implementation is like a pretty book cover with no pages. It looks nice on the shelf and ”coulda, shoulda, woulda been” great. A bad idea with great implementation is like Microsoft Windows (there were much better operating systems in the early days that simply weren’t implemented as well).
So let’s generate ideas and use Our ISA as a tool to communicate them and get some great people to implement them.
Popularity: 9%
ISA Has Forgotten Its Original Mission
Posted by: | Comments I – Dave Harrold, 40+ year senior member of ISA – would argue that a key to returning ISA to a viable organization is to embrace its original mission; that is to establish an organization that helps Instrument Technicians become ever better at their job. (FYI: It’s no fluke that the longtime name of ISA’s publication is “InTech”).
Until the late 70’s early 80’s ISA …did an excellent job of addressing membership needs, but then ISA’s leadership was hi-jacked by self-proclaimed “instrument engineers” and ISA’s wheels began to fall off. What remains is a rudderless organization that relies on “fuzzy logic” to chart its course. Those who argue that ISA needs to be a professional society for “automation and control engineers” are missing the real need; ISA needs to return to its roots and embrace the Instrument Technician who continues to search for straight answers to everyday questions.
Popularity: 12%
Trends & Fulfillments
Posted by: | CommentsThis blog-site has been on line for over a week now and already I have noticed trends and fulfillments of what I said in my perhaps too lengthy piece, Directions.
The most striking is the paucity of comments from our elected leaders out in front.
I suspect there are as many definitions of leadership as there are leaders. Here’s one “Leadership is about setting and not just reacting to agendas, identifying problems, and initiating change that makes for substantive improvement rather than managing change.” (Ann Marie E. McSwain:Lincoln University MO US.)
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) The following leader!
A great leader in Imperial Britain, Benjamin Disraeli is said to have remarked once: “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”
Who?
The senior governing body of ISA is the Executive Board, which is composed of the Society President, President-elect Secretary, Past-President, Treasurer, and twelve Vice Presidents chosen by two subordinate boards to represent all interest areas of the Society. The Board of District Vice Presidents selects six Members of its members, and the Board of Department Vice Presidents selects six members to serve on the ISA Executive Board. These are the people with responsibility the continuance of our society, entrusted by us constitutionally with this task. They are without exception truly representative of our profession.
Here is the incoming Executive Board:
Nelson Ninin
Leo Staples
Jerry Cockrell, CAP
Terry Ives
Stu Affleck
Rick Albrecht
Michael Bovenkamp, P.Eng.,CAP
Marcus Coester
Kevin Dignam
Jose Mattiazzo
Nick Sands, CAP
Bill Stange
Jim Tatera, CSAT
Ian Verhappen, CSAT, CAP
Jim Keaveney (Parliamentarian) and Pat Gouhin (Executive Director) who although they sit on the board do not have voting rights.
How many of these have you seen responding or participating in any of the discussions here? Or on LinkedIn conversations or discussions? Or any other of the blogs discussing where our Society is going? One or two? More? I see some of them are following this on the Facebook page let’s hear more from you guys! I believe you are missing a golden opportunity to participate in the conversation and have your messages heard? We are listening too!
My experience
My own experience has been that where I have made an error of fact, somebody has written to me privately to correct it. Or to point out some action that I did not know about. That is fine in so far as it goes but only in so far as it goes. It ought be handled and faced down, right there where it is stated. If I say (as I did in the Direction article).
- “Many others in private like Cleveland, and in public on various blogs and internet-groups, have commented, suggested, cajoled but still the impression given is of a brick wall or worse a soaked sponge! “I accept what you say, within reason,” but …..”
I expect somebody to reply to the blog, not to me or to the administrator privately, with details of what actions if any were taken. But in fact both I and the admin were contacted privately and the blog “Building and Preserving Association Relevancy” written by Jon DiPietro resulted. However it would have had much more effect to my mind if one of our leaders had posted that with links on where to find the relevant paper on the website. (I still haven’t found it though, thankfully, Jon, with his inestimably and infinitely more intimate knowledge of the mysteries of the virtual world has been able to upload it as part of this blog entry!). The fact that I and a large number of members did not know of the existance of this paper is, to use an Americanism, a whole new ball game, which will possibly be addressed elsewhere.
Open participation
Now Walt Boyes, has written a response to Direction which starts “This is the reply that I sent to a broadcast email from Doug Rothenberg…” Now unless you were “in” the broadcast group that Doug Rothenberg mailed you really have no idea what that reference is about.
This makes another point for me. These conversations must take place in the clear light of day with full input from everyone who has something to say about it. Otherwise, I believe there is little or no chance of getting changes through governance and no shot of preserving the Society we love.
Reply
Comments are being made on other blogs too. For instance Keith Campbell asked on Wednesday (16th Dec ’09), “Will ISA take the wrong path again?” He’s asking important questions on the focus of ISA. Has anybody responded? Privately? Maybe, but to all intents and purposes the questions remain unanswered. Unanswered questions or presumptions may tend to become facts.
The right people?
Finally another point which perhaps is overlooked. People are looking to staff to “solve” the problem. That to my mind is not the job of staff. They sometimes recommend but they actually do what we, the members, through our elected leaders, tell them. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to our staff who have seen us through over sixty years. They have suffered more than many of us this last year but we must realise that our Executive Director and our staff cannot solve this problem, only we can.
So to the members I say: Speak constructively!
To the leaders one short sentence: Follow the members, you, are their leaders!
Popularity: 21%
Problems With Status Quo
Posted by: | CommentsISA is no different from most volunteer based organizations. Every election is for those who are willing to ‘try’ and do the job, with the best of intentions. Or it is a beauty contest, for ego gratification and a line on a resume.
ISA has consistently had good people in management positions. But, as Glenn Harvey stated, there is no innovative thinking. Your other management article said, don’t play for the future by using today as a starting point, because you are only extrapolating; determine what the future should look like, and find the best way to get there.
Unfortunately, the ISA membership is probably the worst group to ask ‘what is the ISA of the future?’ because the bulk of those who are left are ‘status quo’ people. The innovative and progressive have left long ago to find more fitting forums where they can bounce around their ideas.
The paradigm of learning, advertising, marketing has changed in the past 30 years. ISA has not. Why go to the ISA website to find something when a Google search is much quicker?
When was the last time ISA was marketed to the managements of manufacturing or engineering companies? They all know UL, IEEE, AICHE, ASME; but when you mention ISA they get a blank look. This makes discussing S100, S84, and any other standards much more difficult; getting money to attend shows is impossible; training dollars, don’t go there either.
Great strides have been made in recognizing ISA as a standards-writing organization. Unfortunately, the political forces (marketing lobbyists) have cause substantial disruption of the processes. When standards are written by those who support their own interests, the process gets corrupted to the point of irrelevance.
Popularity: 7%
Building and Preserving Association Relevancy
Posted by: | CommentsFrom the “Credit Where Credit Is Due” department, some offline discussions have revealed a laudable effort led by our own ISA some two years ago when they hosted a summit entitled “Building and Preserving Association Relevancy into the Future”. I am treating this particular post as more of a pure reporting function than an editorial and so I will simply embed the document (which is publicly available for download on the ISA web site) and contribute my thoughts in the comments section.
Popularity: 12%
A Modest Proposal…
Posted by: | CommentsWe have been bitching about the direction ISA is to take for at least 20 years that I’ve been in the leadership groups. What I think we have to do now is to start making concrete proposals. So, I offer some that I’ve made in my December editorial:
This will be the third straight month I’ve written about ISA. I am sure many of you, especially since so many of you aren’t ISA members and see no relevance in becoming ISA members, are getting tired of this. So am I. So is former ISA Executive Director Glenn Harvey, who expresses himself quite forcefully in his letter in our Feedback section this month. Of course, in fairness to the people who have been leading ISA since he left, many of the problems that face ISA were created by Glenn and his management team. Glenn feels that it is quite possible that ISA has outlived its usefulness, and because of its inability to reinvent itself, ISA is doomed.
Glenn may be right. After all, as I pointed out last month, less than 0.3% of all potential ISA members worldwide actually belong to the Society. This is beyond irrelevance.
The single biggest problem ISA faces is members. Not lack of membership, but the existing members, each of whom has a vote at the Council of Society Delegates meeting. Granted, the votes are representative, so that the section delegate acts like a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, but they’re responsible to vote the way their members want them to. That’s why it took Dr. Tom Stout and me about a decade to get the bylaws changed to permit legislative advocacy, which ISA is now doing quite well, thank you. That’s why it took Steve Huffman and Kim Miller Dunn and a whole band of intrepid leaders over a decade to get the silly name change done.
Major change in the Society must be agreed to by the membership, most of whom won’t sit still for major changes. Many simply like their ISA the way it was.
There are some things a dynamic leadership can do, if they want to, that would circumvent the need to ask the membership—things that need to be done right away. One of the most important is to abandon the abortive Automation Federation. Now that ISA has Automation in its real name, the AF is irrelevant and a duplication of effort. The compliance institute effort needs to be abandoned or cut loose of ISA to live or die. Sometimes you just can’t do all the good ideas.
More staff needs to be cut. Sorry, many of them are my friends, but it has to be done. ISA staff is still far too large for its membership. There are many things that ISA does because they have always done them, rather like the children’s song, “We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here…” Now is the time to do ruthless triage on these things. ISA might want to outsource some of these things, such as publishing books, training, etc. for a royalty or a percentage. Other people simply do these things better than ISA can afford to. I talked about membership last month. But, the Council of Society Delegates is about as likely to vote itself out of existence as the U.S. Congress is.
ISA has another problem—it isn’t really “international at all.” ISA has had great difficulty getting traction in many parts of the world. Some places have their own automation societies, and have no use for ISA. ISA needs to meet this head on.
There have been calls lately for ISA to spend a significant chunk of money ($300K to $450K) on an outside consultant to tell them what to do. Come on. ISA has been doing studies since Glenn was running it, and the end result is the classic rearrangement of the deck chairs. ISA’s executive board needs to hire a business turnaround specialist, not another association manager or do more studies—or divvy up the money and go home.
It is possible that Glenn Harvey is right. But if ISA dies, we’ll have to invent another society to help keep automation a real profession. Maybe we should do that anyway.
Popularity: 7%
Leading the (ISA) Tribe
Posted by: | Comments
Seth Godin gives us this challenge: Can you get your idea to spread or not? His point of view is that no matter what you are doing (selling, coordinating, standardizing, revolutionizing, etc…) this is the only thing that matters. This post summarizes his excellent presentation. However, I hope you can take 17 minutes of your time to watch it and perhaps gain some knowledge, perspective, and inspiration.
Eoin’s opening salvo on this site talked a lot about leadership. This is a hot topic these days, with past and current leaders beseeching newcomers to take “leadership roles.” I have heard these suggestions, but could not help thinking that the type of leadership they advocate and the kind of leadership that is required are two different things. My take is that the type of leadership ISA needs right now is the type that helps ideas spread.
The Television-Industrial Complex
In his presentation, Godin speaks of what he calls the “television-industrial complex,” which enabled people with messages they wanted to communicate to interrupt millions of people and force/trick them into listening to information they may or may not care about regarding a solution to a problem they may or may not have. This is a great approach if you have two things; lots of money and a time machine to bring you back to the 1980’s. This model is broken and the lesson for ISA here is that interruptive advertising no longer works. Interruptive advertising includes print ads, web banners and email marketing. You do the math.
Me-Mail
I think I have, to a certain extent, branded myself as a “social media drum-beater” within ISA. While I won’t shy away from that, I worry that it distracts from the full picture. The point here is that the entire range of technological innovation in the 21st century has enabled a “me-centric” information model. Having more choices and less time to evaluate them today, people now have both the requirement and means to filter out messages that don’t resonate deeply and personally with them. This is not only an online phenomenon – witness the proliferation of DVRs that are rendering the television commercial more and more impotent.
To this end, Godin points out the reality that people don’t want e-mail, they want me-mail. There is much profundity packed into that small phrase and has particular applicability to ISA with its current struggles to find the sweet spot in terms of member emails (which will be the subject of an entirely separate post and discussion).
Be Remarkable
So let’s say you now accept that the world has changed and that people are getting better at filtering out stuff they don’t care about. What’s the solution? The solution is to a) be remarkable and b) communicate with early adopters.
Being “remarkable” means having something to say or sell that is worth other people talking about. It’s that simple. It used to be that if you were remarkable and had the means to get that message in front of enough people (e.g. television, InTech advertising) you were golden. It turns out today that marketing to the middle of the bell curve is pretty ineffective today, so we should instead be focusing our attention on early adopters. Early adopters have all sorts of great qualities. They tend to be Trust Agents, and possess a passion that can be more powerful than print, not to mention far less costly. If you have something remarkable to offer, they will help spread your ideas.
And that’s what it’s all about – spreading ideas.
Popularity: 14%