Tag: election

Midyear board meeting

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ILCThe International Leadership Committee (ILC) announced its nominees for international office.  The ILC selected James Kokocki (from Canada) and Mohammed Murad (from Dubai) for Second Vice President, so I will be running from the floor.  This isn’t really a bad thing, since floor candidates won the last two elections (John Lau from Malaysia and George Yen from Taiwan).  Plus, I received the most mentions in the International Officer Candidate Survey (IOCS), so I have strong support for the August election in Las Vegas.

I’m disappointed that only 60% of the IOCS recipients replied despite multiple e-mails from WHQ and multiple phone calls from the candidates.  The current and immediate past district governors account for most of the IOCS recipients, and these are people who are deeply involved in our organization.  I wish I knew why they didn’t (please e-mail me if you’re someone who didn’t reply, or comment below).  I’m guessing they think their opinion doesn’t matter, or they believe they don’t know the candidates well enough to provide an informed opinion.

The midyear board meeting had other interesting developments.  Perhaps the biggest was that there’s movement towards providing more materials on-line.  The briefing mentioned that the board had approved “digital content transition” guiding principles, but included no details on what those were.

Here are some guiding principles that I recommend (I’ve written on this before):

  • There’s no practical way to protect something once it’s released on-line; copy protection doesn’t work (look at DVD and Blu-ray) and is always broken.  It only takes one person to break it and then post it openly for everyone else to use.
  • Requiring use of any particular proprietary software for it to be accessed will block a significant number of people.  Plain HTML (web pages) and PDF (many readers available) are the only practical choices.  Anything else won’t work for people who are on Apple or Linux, or on a phone or tablet, or some other device that doesn’t support the proprietary software, or who are using a PC they’re not allowed to install software on (like at work or a library).  (PDF files are already available for manuals provided to visually-impaired members.)
  • The value in Toastmasters isn’t in the published material, it’s in the club meetings and evaluations.  Someone downloading a manual isn’t going to get a lot out of it unless they have a club meeting to go to.
  • The on-line materials must be printable, so that overseas users who want paper can avoid the shipping costs, and so the evaluation page can be printed and filled out at the meeting.  We must still provide the option of buying printed manuals.
  • The organization doesn’t make a significant amount of profit on selling educational material (revenue approximately matches printing and shipping costs), it’s not a revenue stream that we need to worry about preserving.
  • Openly publishing the educational materials would quickly make it very obvious to everyone that we really are the world leader in oral communications.

The rebranding initiative is nearly ready for release, and will be announced at the August convention.  This is pretty exciting, and International President Pat Johnson writes more about why we need this in her March 2011 column in the Toastmaster magazine.

There’s also a major consolidation  and reorganization of the policies and protocols, rolling it up into a single comprehensive document, available April 1.  This will be a lot easier to use and understand than the dozens of PDFs we have to reference now.

Next step for me is to prepare for the district spring conferences, they start next month!

Toastmasters elections vs. U.S. political elections

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As many of you probably know, the U.S. elections were a few weeks ago.  As a candidate myself, albeit for a rather different sort of office, I viewed the TV ads with a different eye than two years ago.

Some were good issues-oriented ads, extolling the virtues and experience of the candidate.  Unfortunately, the major political races in Illinois degenerated into mud-slinging, with ads about the opponent concluding with words like “Who IS this guy?” in a deep and worried voice.

I’m quite glad that our campaign policies prohibit that sort of mess.  We keep campaigns positive and constructive, just like our speech evaluations.  Candidates talk about what they bring to the table, not what the opposition lacks.  I talk about my skills in strategic planning, my experience in Toastmasters, my passion for the organization.  It’s up to the voters to decide who the better candidate is, based on what they say — or don’t say.

I served as a Chicago election judge several times, and it was an interesting and fun experience in democracy.  Judges had to be at the polls by 5 AM so we could open at 6 AM, and the polls closed at 7 PM, with our duties completed around 8 PM — a 15 hour day.  Since turnout was light, I spent most of the day sitting and chatting with the other judges.  In a typical precinct of about 1000 voters, you might get 150 of them in an off-year election, or maybe 300 in a presidential election.  Spread over that long day, the four of us weren’t very busy, other than the before-work and after-work crunch.

Knowing that all those other eligible voters didn’t bother to vote was depressing, never mind those who didn’t even register.  I’ve heard people say that they dislike all the candidates, so they don’t vote, or that their vote won’t matter out of thousands or millions.

We face a voter turnout problem in Toastmasters as well.  In a post I made soon after the August 2010 convention, I noted that while most districts returned over 70% of the club ballots, six were under 50% and one was just 14%.  While some clubs may not really know or care how the organization is run (until it comes to dues!), districts should know and should care, and should work hard to collect those proxies and cast them as they see fit, whether for a governance proposal or for candidates.

There are many opportunities to get to know our candidates in a positive way — through their web site, social media fan pages, e-mail, phone calls, the  candidates’ showcase at the convention, and individual interviews.  (No TV or radio ads though!)  Where possible, talk to people who have worked with the candidate and find out their experiences with the candidate in real-world leadership roles — while we can judge the World Champion of Public Speaking in 5-7 minutes, judging leadership is something that takes months or years.

Collecting club proxies can be a great High Performance Leadership project, which is often the last thing members do on the road to a DTM.  Start looking now for someone who would be interested in doing this, and let’s get every district up to at least 80% of clubs represented.  They’ll need to recruit a committee with representatives in every division (and maybe every area) to reach out to clubs, and that takes time.  This might be done by the Area or Division Governors, but since this isn’t a core part of the AG or DivG’s mission, would be better done by someone else (maybe a past or future AG/DivG!).

Let’s make sure every club is represented in Las Vegas in August 2011!

Running unopposed?

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Running for Second Vice President is an interesting experience for me, particularly running against other candidates.  Of course, running for a world-wide office is considerably different from running at the district level.  When I was Area Governor, I was appointed, and for Division Governor, I was unopposed.

When I ran for Lt. Gov’r Marketing (LGM), there were two other candidates (rare in my district!), and I took it pretty seriously.  I developed a tri-fold brochure and a small poster to take to all the division contests, and the other two candidates were at all the same contests with a flier as well.

At the election, I gave a two-minute speech, and I honestly don’t remember a word of it at this point, but I guess I got through it (I was an ATM-B at the time).  No one got a majority at the first vote, it took a second vote before I got a slight majority (64-61, I think).  It really was a great experience!

As is typical, I was unopposed for Lt. Gov’r Education and District Governor (photo above).  When I announced for International Director, someone else also announced, but a couple of months later, he dropped out due to a huge increase in responsibility at work.

However, I still ran it as if I were opposed, hitting 11 out of 16 district conferences in the region in the fall and spring (the others were on conflicting dates).  I had a professional photograph taken, did a tri-fold brochure and a posterboard to take to conferences, and built a web site.  I had intended to set the campaign up as a High Performance Leadership project, but I have to confess that when I became unopposed, I didn’t follow through on that idea.

In many ways, I regret that no one was running against me.  I believe a little friendly competition can bring out the best.  Still, I have a chance to do that now, as there are at least three other people, all incredibly talented, also running for Second Vice President.

I really enjoyed handing out the announcement cards at the end of the Palm Springs convention last month.  It gave me a chance to confirm what some people were suspecting, and I had some fascinating (though brief) conversations.  It was my last opportunity to see most of these Toastmasters leaders face to face before the convention in Las Vegas next August!

I will be reaching out to Toastmasters leaders in the coming months with personal phone calls (campaign rules sharply limit my use of other means), and I look forward to finding out more about what YOUR concerns are, where we’re doing well, what we can improve upon, and sharing my ideas about future directions.

Please feel free to contact me directly (details are at the bottom of my site’s home page), or if appropriate, just add a comment on my blog here, I’ll reply!