Although ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference concluded last week, I want to encourage everyone to take advantage of the free recording  of the general closing session from Great Ideas with Daniel Pink. Pink, who’s the author of bestselling “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” had a great session and discussed how the concept of motivation and rewards are more complex for humans than we may think.

I downloaded the presentation and took the time to watch it since I wasn’t at Great Ideas and only followed the tweets with hashtag #ideas10. I know others have blogged about their own takeaways, but I wanted to include a few of my own thoughts.

1. Dan Pink is a great speaker. He’s entertaining and truly knows what he’s talking about.

2. Higher rewards lead to worse performance. This may sound counter-intuitive, so if you’re curious, listen to Pink explain why.

3. Allowing employees pursue their own projects 20 percent of the time leads to innovation and engagement (two HUGE association buzzwords!). Google follows this model, and it led to Gmail and many other Google products we all use today.

4. Everyone wants to be a master at their trade/job/career/whatever. Humans crave progress no matter what the reward. It’s intrinsic.

What’s unique about Dan Pink is that his speaking at Great Ideas was crowdsourced. ASAE & The Center issued a survey to members and attendees, who overwhelmingly said they want to hear from Dan at the conference.

This is a fantastic presentation that I think association professionals of all ages and experience levels can benefit from. It’s definitely worth your time.

Happy Friday! It’s finally starting to fee like spring here in Atlanta; now if only those annoying rainstorms would quit. I’m so ready for spring: more daylight, outdoor eating, baseball, the NFL Draft, flowers … it’s pretty perfect. Speaking of more daylight, don’t forget to spring your clocks forward this Saturday night before hitting the sack. Losing an hour is the only downside of the beginning of Daylight Savings Time — I’m really looking forward to longer days.

With many people attending the Great Ideas Conference, there was some great stuff in the association blogosphere this week, but not every post highlighted the conference.

1. Wes Trochlil shared some tips for organizations converting their data to a new database. There are some great reminders here, such as to stop keeping track of data you don’t need or use, keep your legacy database for future reference and only convert the data you need. Wes’ database tips always spot-on.

2. One of the newer-to-me blogs I’ve discovered recently is Ellen Behrens’. She writes the aLearning blog, and her post this week on exit interviews for members was fantastic. Members who don’t renew often have powerful information that would be beneficial to the organization, so definitely take a look at this post.

3. I read a ton of blogs, and they’re not all association-focused. This post, though, from the Six Pixels of Separation blog, discusses mobile technologies: “The Lines Continue to Blur (at Breakneck Speeds).” This one’s a great reminder about how much the use of mobile technology is increasing — and that it’s not just kids who are using it. Are you ready?

4. Lynn Morton wrote some awesome posts about Great Ideas this week, but here’s her takeaway post. From the more casual (use Emergen-C if you’re sick!) to the more serious (the spirit is there, the content is not), Lynn shared her thoughts from ASAE’s conference and encourages others to push the envelope a bit more.

5. Maddie Grant also had a great collection of takeaway and links post-Great Ideas. Her main takeaway was the concept of “autonomy,” which was discussed during Dan Pink’s closing general session. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.

I hope everyone had a great weekend! Don’t forget to set your clocks forward!

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