Our Pundit edition of July 30th included letters from 13 industry members including one from Rick Antle, CEO and President at Tanimura & Antle. Our continued focus on this issue led to this letter from a friend of Rick’s:
Keep pushing on this. the problem is we don’t have a lot of BOLD leaders like we use to, who took action, did what they had to do.. Now its wine tasting. Board meetings with not much accomplished and egos to be stroked.
What about we make Rick Antle (aka Yoda) CEO of the merged associations for 2 years (only 2 years or he will become a worse egomaniac than he is now). He will kick ass, fire the non-productive/redundant, set the merged vision and then hire a CEO. Pay Tom, Bryan for this 2 year period to be advisors to the board.
Then they can compete in 2 years for CEO.
Go straight to a merged Association.
No 3-4 year phase out of conventions.
No duplication.
Get it Done…
— Steve Scaroni
Founder / CEO
Valley Harvesting & Packing, Inc.
Vegpacker de Mexico
Heber, California
Yes, but would Tonya let Rick take the job?
Seriously, the point here is that there is always a way to decide that what you need to do can’t be done yet. That is why so many organizations wait until they are in crisis to make changes. Part of what this whole process is about is moving to make changes voluntarily now, rather than waiting until change has to be made out of necessity later.
It is tempting to think that an outsider, non-association guy, could step in, shake things etc., etc., but the truth is that the world has become so specialized — skill-sets required to do different things are so specific — that what we would lose in professionalism is more than we would gain in urgency.
It is, however, important to remember that associations exist to serve the industry. That is why having this merger collapse over the CEO issue is so damaging. It makes it seem as if things are the other way around and protecting the staff is the really important thing.
We’ve provided a couple of options. Here we defined a way to break the impasse over who should be CEO, and here we laid out an alternative plan to preserve two associations while eliminating duplication.
If the associations had gone through the paces, and each came to the conclusion that the industry would be better off if they were separate, that would be one thing. But if the association boards are not willing to say that, industry leadership has to find an alternative solution.
Use ours — no charge — or come up with another plan, but as Steve Scaroni admonishes us: “Get it Done”
Many thanks to Steve for weighing in on this important matter.
