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January 2007 From the President's Desk: An Idea from a Dictator

by Jack El-Hai

In my previous 17 columns for this space in the newsletter, I have avoided using stereotypically presidential terms and jargon. You have never seen me write "at this point in time," "thinking outside the box," "pushing the envelope," "implement," "impact" (as a verb) or "worst-case scenario." Like many of you, I don't like bureaucratic terminology. But finally, as I hit the final months of my two years as president, I find I must depart from my high-minded standards of language so that I can unveil to you a development of significance. Maybe it's not my standards that have failed, but my mental capacity. You judge.

WARNING: Potentially objectionable terms-"task force" and "five-year plan"-follow.

As I was working on the agenda for our most recent in-person ASJA Board meeting last November, I suddenly stopped what I was doing. The agenda list included such discussion topics as the future of our annual conference, the information-keeping and accounting systems we use in our office, a proposed change to our Board structure, personnel matters, our organizational budget, and a proposal for an ASJA Code of Ethics.

The Board could competently reach decisions about all of these important topics, but I felt uneasy that we would arrive at our conclusions in a vacuum. We could decide to enlarge or relocate our annual conference, for example, but we would be doing so with only a limited understanding of how our choices would affect ASJA and our members' professional lives in the future. (By the way, we have not decided to enlarge or relocate our conference.)

I thought we lacked an overall vision. (Add "vision" to the warning list of objectionable terms.) As I considered this problem, my glance fell upon a biography I had recently read of Josef Stalin. During his reign as dictator of the Soviet Union, Stalin used ambitious five-year plans to lift his nation from industrial and agricultural backwardness to a position of great strength. He had a singular dedication to his goals. Millions of Soviet citizens starved, vanished, and were executed while he sought the completion of his plans.

To my surprise, I found myself inspired by Stalin's example, although I realized that starvation, murder and monomaniacal leadership would probably not go over well among ASJA's members. You are a tough and critical lot. Happily, deprivation and exiles to the gulags are not necessary to what I had in mind.

At our meeting, I proposed to the Board that we create a five-year plan for ASJA. The plan would set several long-term goals for the organization, and would also include year-by-year steps to carry us to those goals. To develop the plan, we'd have to ask ourselves many tough questions. What do we want ASJA to look like in 2012? How do we want our membership to change? What services will we provide? How is the business of freelance writing changing, and what can ASJA do to help members flourish amid the new demands on our careers?

I further proposed that we set up a task force to look into these questions and recommend a plan that we can follow for the next five years. Notice I wrote task force and not committee. ASJA is full to the brim with committees, and our system of volunteerism-without parallel among other writers' organizations, I believe-depends upon them. But I wanted the group working on the five-year plan to be different from most ASJA committees.

The Five-Year Plan Task Force, I hoped, would include not only concerned and interested members, but also a couple of people from allied fields who do not belong to ASJA: editors, agents, publishers, new media experts. Including these people in the task force will give us new insights into the future that lies ahead, and it will also build bridges between ASJA and other parts of the publishing industry that could help us even beyond the work of the task force.

The Board received these ideas with enthusiasm. As you read this, we will be starting to form the Five-Year Plan Task Force. If you would like to recommend someone for the group, or if you'd like to contribute to it yourself, please get in touch with me.

Now that's pushing the envelope.

You can reach ASJA President Jack El-Hai at prez@asja.org.

Jack El-Hai of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is president of ASJA. E-mail the president through www.asja.org/contact.php.