Eric Lanke

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My Top Five Blog Posts of 2019

Eric Lanke

I've been posting these Top Five lists at the end of every year for the last seven years. Over those seven years, a handful of posts have come to dominate them. Their popularity, it seems, feeds on itself, with more and more people accessing them every year (probably in part because I keep promoting them through these Top Five wrap-ups at the end of each year).

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The Lost Art of Reading Blogs

Eric Lanke

In last week's post I made a passing reference to one of the main reasons I keep blogging -- namely, that I enjoy having readers respond to the things I write. And I promised more on that subject this week. Well, it's true. I do like having readers respond to the things I write here. But here's something else that's true. Almost no one ever does. Here's a quick story.

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Podcasting Creates Interest and Excitement

Eric Lanke

Today we launched a podcast at my association. It's called Fluid Power Forward , and on it, we plan to interview interesting people who are helping to move fluid power technology forward. If you're interested, you can listen to our first episode here. The project was fairly long in coming. The idea was first hatched at the tail-end of 2018, when I realized that there was a lot of interesting things going on in our industry, that we consistently presented and talked about those things at our work

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Participation Tracking Is Not for the Faint of Heart

Eric Lanke

We track our members. We don't use face recognition software, metadata, or complicated algorithms. We use an even more diabolical mechanism. Microsoft Excel. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the sometimes difficult work of maintaining a member participation tracking system in your association. A way of knowing how many and which programs or activities each member is participating in.

System 124
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The Chairman's Gift Revisited

Eric Lanke

I wrote a blog post back in July 2012 called The Chairman's Gift. It's a pretty popular post, making most of my year-end Top Five lists, and capturing the eighth most number of pageviews from among the more than 600 posts that have appeared on this blog. In it, I describe a tradition we have in our association of giving a gift to our outgoing Chairman of the Board.

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Customer Service Not Worth Emulating

Eric Lanke

A bit of a rant this week. On my most recent business trip, a staff member of mine rented a car for us. She is not a "preferred" member of the rental car company she worked with, so she had to stand in line and wait to be served. It was awful. There was only one agent working the desk and I counted nine people in front of my staff member. I timed how long the first person took at the counter.

Products 113
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X Matrix by Darrell Casey

Eric Lanke

There’s a long subtitle here: “Strategy Deployment and Execution Process for Breakthrough Business Performance.” The book was given to be by the Board chair of the association I work for and, although clearly written for a manufacturing environment, there are some transferable ideas that could benefit those non-profit organizations. X Matrix is the name of the system the author describes in what is obviously a self-published and, unfortunately, typo-riddled treatise.

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