This concept came out of discussion with my wonderful friend and colleague, Michelle Murrain.
If there's anything I like better than a congenial client, it's an opportunity to pull a favorite colleague into a project with a congenial client. In this case the client is Doug Koplow, the founder of Earth Track, and the colleague is Michelle.
The three of us had work to do together in Cambridge on Tuesday, and when we were done, there was time for Michelle and me indulge in a wide-ranging, leisurely conversation before going on to the Ethos Roundtable and Boston 501 Tech Club events.
Somewhere in this non-linear exchange - about the Earth Track project, the environment, the state of nonprofit technology, the multiplicity of social networking web sites, and several world religions - we got on the subject of how inappropriately named the "...For Dummies" series is. In my opinion, the technical guides in this series are really quite good, but I take issue with the assumption that the readers are stupid and ignorant. It's difficult to recommend them to frantic executive directors who are trying to catch up with the technology that their nonprofits need; to me, the titles seem so degrading. Of course, it's all in fun, but I still don't like it.
Michelle and I agreed that we often deal with executive directors who cope with technology by groveling and apologizing for their ignorance, or by developing elaborate (often angry) rationales for why they shouldn't need to know this stuff. My sympathies are entirely with them. Nobody is born knowing this stuff, and executive directors are often busy figuring out entirely other stuff. I laughingly suggested that we need a series of technical reference books that are titled, "...For People Who Are Smart About Other Things." Michelle quite liked the idea, and I promised to blog about it.
Actually, I don't think that an entirely new series needs to be developed. With a little repackaging and a slight change of name, the current "...For Dummies" series of technical references could easily be retrofitted for confused executive directors who have been busy learning how to keep their organizations together (and make the world a better place) and haven't had time to sit down and learn the difference between CRM and CMS. The series "...For People Who Are Smart About Other Things" could be a nice little brand extension for the publisher.
