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Five Ideas to Engage Your Audience

When I have the opportunity to speak to a group, my challenge is to find the most bored and tuned out person sitting in the audience and get him or her more fully engaged with whatever subject matter I’m presenting. Given that I’m usually trying to influence audience members to move toward greater stewardship ofContinue reading “Five Ideas to Engage Your Audience”

Five Ways to Build a Strong Membership

Twice in my career I have run membership organizations. In each case building membership was important to our work. And I learned a lot about that from others who had been building membership successfully for years. These are five of the better tactics for building and retaining a strong and lasting membership in my experience:Continue reading “Five Ways to Build a Strong Membership”

Learning from Failure

I once had a government job as a manager with a small direct-report staff and responsibilities for training more than 200 employees. I was called into my supervisor’s office and asked to stop talking about mistakes I had made and failed business efforts. I was destroying employee confidence in me it seemed. Our corporate cultureContinue reading “Learning from Failure”

Let’s Get Personal

Every time I go in my bank I expect to hear one of the clerks I’ve seen many times to call me by name. It never happens. I am in there every week or two and have been using this bank for 15 years. They are consistent. No one, even if they’ve seen me aContinue reading “Let’s Get Personal”

Not all those who wander are lost . . .*

Phil Hewlett and David Packard of HP fame suggested that “management by walking around” is an extraordinarily useful tool for seeing how operations are going in the workplace. Just getting out and seeing how your employees are working and interacting with each other can tell you far more than staying in your office and onlyContinue reading “Not all those who wander are lost . . .*”

Five Reasons Why You Should Have an Interpretive Plan

I cringe when I hear the words Ready-Fire-Aim used to describe the planning approach that many organizations use in developing new programs and facilities. I cringe because it was my favorite approach thirty years ago. I simply had no planning experience and it seemed reasonable to try something, anything, and hope it would work. FundersContinue reading “Five Reasons Why You Should Have an Interpretive Plan”

Who’s really in charge – power, authority, or influence?

Think of the last time you had a dinner party. Perhaps your spouse invited the boss and his family and now you’re faced with figuring out the menu. You ask your spouse what to serve, and he or she says, “It doesn’t matter, you decide and I’ll be fine with that.” Okay, you’ve been givenContinue reading “Who’s really in charge – power, authority, or influence?”

Facilitators – the Question People

We have just returned from an excellent Interpret Europe Conference in Sigtuna, Sweden, with about 165 colleagues from 40 nations. I am mulling over the ideas than ran through the presentations. “Be a facilitator,” certainly seemed to be one of the consistent messages. Excellent keynotes by Ted Cable, Mette Knudsen, Poul Seidler and James CarterContinue reading “Facilitators – the Question People”

On the Road in Stockholm – The Music and Theater Museum

We are on the road again in Stockholm, Sweden, on our way to the Interpret Europe Conference in Sigtuna and the Nordic-Baltic Seminar on Heritage Interpretation and Cooperation in Uppsala. We were here eighteen months ago for a conference in Visby on Gotland Island and enjoyed wandering around Stockholm for a couple of days atContinue reading “On the Road in Stockholm – The Music and Theater Museum”

Ecotour to National Parks of Rwanda – Gorillas and Duikers and Chimps, oh my!

When we first read Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fosse and then saw the movie, we were intrigued by the possibility of one day visiting the Virunga Volcanoes to spend time with mountain gorillas. It seemed a distant dream until October of 2012 when we were training guides in Rwanda’s Nyungwe National Park. OnContinue reading “Ecotour to National Parks of Rwanda – Gorillas and Duikers and Chimps, oh my!”