CCore Strategies Technology Industry and Channel Consulting

By Jim Carey, Core Strategies

I used to sleep late on Saturday mornings, but then my next door neighbors decided to do a gut rehab on their house. So at 7:00 AM on Saturday, the klopita klopita machine fires up over at Dan and Lisa's place.

They tell me the house will be beautiful in 3 months. I can't wait.

Until this started, I thought "gut rehab" was something you saw on a Chuck Norris infomercial. ("Get ripped abs in 6 minutes a day with Gut Rehab!") But it turns out to be construction term for hollowing out a structure, and replacing and upgrading the insides. Gutting and rehabilitating it.

I was happier before I knew that.

The world economy is going through a "gut rehab" right now, and we're all a part of making it happen. So much of what's turning business inside out is driven by the things that we do - cutting out the middleman to connect directly with customers, building relationships on an individual basis, segmenting our messages and varying our offerings. It's rocket science to everyone else, but it's old stuff to us.

The New CADM Framework

Now that the CADM is 40+ years old (or "in it's prime" as I tell my peers), it's appropriate to ask if the framework that sustained us so far is appropriate for the next half century. And, as we've worked on it on the CADM board, we've decided it's time for a "gut rehab" of the CADM.

You've already seen some of the ways that this has taken effect:

A renewed emphasis on knowledge transfer to make you more valuable to your company and to yourself.
Programming focussed on "morphing" your skills from classic direct marketing to the new marketing that integrates the online and offline worlds.
Developing several new special interest groups to make our content more relevant to you.
Finding new ways to deliver programming directly to you at your desk.

It's not an easy process. In some cases, it means giving less emphasis to things we liked, but that we have covered many times before. However, we believe our greatest value to you is in integrating what's new and hot, with what is established and proven.

CADM's House

We're also working on how we manage our association.

Ours is a peculiar institution. We have thousands of local members, and hundreds of wonderful volunteers. Keeping everything moving in the same direction -- with all these smart, creative, energetic folks (who, by the way, do it for free) -- is the management equivalent of herding cats.

For several years, we've worked with our friends at Bostrom as our association management partner. Sharon Bennett has led a team of dedicated staffers in managing events, registrations, finance, communications and "making the trains run on time."

But now, we believe it is time to build our own management team. We feel that a team dedicated solely and exclusively to the unique needs of the CADM membership will best serve you, and best provide a platform for the next stage of our growth.

We're now in the process of interviewing a new Executive Director, to come on board with the charter of helping us get to the next level. The possibilities are exciting. We'll keep you posted as this unfolds.

Living on the Job Site

Gut rehabs are a pain. There's a lot of noise, and there's dust everywhere. It's hard to live in them when they're happening.

But we all put up with it, because we know that when it's done -- and believe me, we're moving as fast as we can -- we'll have a solid foundation for decades to come. And our house will be a very fine house.

We continue to need your help to shape our future. It's a challenge worthy of our collective talents. Let's do it.