Our New Executive Vice President Discusses His Aspirations for the ACR

September is Rheumatic Disease Awareness Month. Encourage your patients & others to visit www.RDAM.org to learn about rheumatic diseases & sign up to join the Simple Tasks community.

Grow

If we are successful in developing these member experiences and increasing the opportunities for everyone to become more engaged, the ACR will continue to grow—not only in membership, but in the scale of its programs and services, educational programming and overall influence throughout the world.

This growth should include all stakeholders. To foster growth, the ACR and its volunteer-led programs need to become more diverse and include many different perspectives. This includes a wider diversity of members and leaders, and could potentially include more collaboration with other organizations that operate within the rheumatology ecosystem.

2018–19 ACR board of directors and committee chairs recognize Rheumatic Disease Awareness Month.

To be more inclusive of all stakeholders, the ACR needs to identify those perspectives that are not sufficiently included. Part of the answer is to gather more data about our membership and determine the breadth and depth of these various stakeholder groups. The next step is to gather those groups that are less represented, provide a way for them to participate in the development of ACR programs and products and, ultimately, allow them to become more represented in the volunteer network of the ACR.

It was Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born American management consultant, educator and author, who first expressed the idea that “the customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling.”

Prof. Christensen explains that “understanding the job to be done really helps us in making innovation predictable.” He concludes that “it’s not about how big companies fail, but about how successful companies learn how to grow.”

Now is the time for us to begin developing a list of jobs to be done and helping the ACR’s leadership deliver on its promise to be “here for you so you can be there for your patients.” You can help us develop that list by submitting your ideas on how and why you use ACR products or services. What is the job you want a given ACR product to do? Is it getting that job done? Once we know the answers, we can help improve the experience or create new ones that are more effective in getting the job done.

Submit your ideas to [email protected].

To learn more about Prof. Christensen’s jobs to be done theory, read his interview in the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.