| AOG Leaders' Conference Summary |
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| Written by Mike Lyman | |
| Wednesday, 16 August 2006 | |
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I attended the AOG Leaders Conference for the third year in a row last week. As usual AOG put on a good meeting and presented a lot of information in short period of time. AOG will be putting the formal proceedings online shortly so I will mostly cover my impressions and some of my notes. In general, this seemed to be very similar to the previous meetings. The same type briefings and similar information being presented as the last two year. Some of the same questions were being asked and some of the presentations are of things that still aren’t quite there. The big difference this year was a general impression that we actually were just about there on many things and that after just eight months, the leaner AOG governance structure was having an impact. One very noticeable difference was the presence of the Board of Directors through out the weekend. While the old BOT had many people at previous conferences, the BoD was there and very actively participating throughout the conference. The first day started out with a briefing by Ted Stroup ’62, our new chairman and he spoke during many of the sessions. It was very clear that Ted has directed the Board of Directors and our committees and task forces to take a very serious and business like look at what AOG does and make sure it does it right. He made it clear the directions are to make the hard business decisions that businesses have to make. The clear picture was that while fund raising was still important, focus on the grads was very important. Still, on recurring theme through out the conference was the expectation that AOG leadership would be “donors of record” to the Long Gray Line Endowment. The amount wasn’t important but supporting the AOG to support the grads was important. Ted also talked about abolishing the old committees and establishing new ones that are called out in the by laws and establishing task forces to tackle specific issues at the direction of the BoD.We met the new Supe, LTG Hagenbeck, ’71. His presentation was similar to previous years but mentioned a few things that were his focus. One was the change in the mission of USMA last year have been very important with our friends in DC. The other was a focus on ethics and honor that extends beyond the academy. He mentioned many of the ethical issues that have cropped up in the war. One of his focuses is on people policing their own, both cadets and the officers on staff. He mentioned officers talking about watching drunk cadets coming back from the Firstie Club and asked if they just watched or did anything. He talked to the cadets about policing their own on issues like drinking. He mentioned that drinking incidents were actually on the decline and that efforts to teach responsible drinking were working. We had a lunch time presentation by LTC John Nagl ’88 on his “Trying to eat soup with a knife” paper on the army’s efforts to learn and relearn counter insurgency fighting. Mentioned that the one successful effort in this area that the British did with the Malaysians took 12 years. If that’s the benchmark, we’ve got a long way to go. It was not an optimistic, all will work out well presentation but showed what we were learning and how we were adapting but that we’re not there yet. After lunch we had a recent commanders panel talking about their Iraq experience. This was not an all is well presentation either but instead a very realistic assessment of where we are and how things are going. At the lower levels we’re doing pretty good and adjusting. Most actionable intel is coming from the unit themselves and not from above. Soldiers know they are making the country safer they are making a difference. The officers actually had favorable things to say about the press that actually managed to get out of the green zone and see what was actually going on. COL Geczy (sp?) made an interesting observation that today’s officers are from the “spoiled” generation that inherited an Army that had been rebuilt after Vietnam and that the Vietnam generation could really help with lessons learned when it comes time to rebuild the army this time around. (That was also a general comment in the class break out sessions as the younger classes were looking at the older classes for ideas on how to support the families of our fallen grads.)We had a fantastic presentation from LTC Craig Flowers the head of DCA. Very informative and very funny. The man has a second career a head of him in stand up comedy. He has been on the job for about five months and has been directed to turn around several programs that were losing money. There are 116 clubs cadets participate in. DCA has a $19 million/year budget and the clubs directly get $1.8 million for their own budget. The rest goes to support the DCA infrastructure like transportation, staff salary, facilities etc. (Don’t let the 10% going to the cadets fool you, that’s 10% directly to the clubs, the rest still supports the programs but not directly into the clubs’ budgets.) One major issue he is facing is the theater loses about $200K per year if my notes are right and that needs to be turned around. They are working hard on that, canceling shows they know will fail, brining in others that will work and doing smart things like actually letting security know there is a show coming up and working to eliminate the long lines to get on post. Another way he will increase funding is taking over the USMA memorabilia business from AAFES which did about $400K in business in USMA stuff last year. He really needs our support which mostly comes through our donations to AOG and some directly to him. (I believe I heard him say he can take about $5K donations directly but I may have misheard that.) LTC Flowers also reported on class rings since that was an issue remaining from last year’s conference. Ring prices are coming down, (no hard numbers) but are still higher than some other schools. There is no direct comparison with other schools so comparing to others schools isn’t quite accurate. One example is monthly on site visits from the ring vendor to take care of issues with cadet’s rings. Cadets now have the option to bring in outside stone which may save them money. The stones do have to be appraised before being turned over to the ring company to protect everybody but that seems understandable to me. From there we went into break out sessions and I attended the class sessions. We started out with a presentation by Tom Mulyca ’73 on the pending upgrade to the AOG website. They are both switching to a content management system which will make updating the site much easier and having outside consultants help restructure the site. The new system will make it easier for the staff to get content on the site and in January they will be hiring a content manager to help get that done. The new system will offer new capabilities to classes and societies for type and save websites rather than creating a web page and uploading it like most do today. Some classes are already doing similar things at WP-ORG with content management systems and are quite happy with that approach. When AOG’s system comes online, classes and societies will have the ability to leverage AOG’s system or use WP-ORG’s capabilities to use other technologies beyond what AOG will be offering. I personally see the sites I maintain using both WP-ORG and AOG to leverage AOG’s database and WP-ORG to do things AOG won’t be able to provide. This was followed by a great presentation by Greg Louks ’88 on how AOG has changed the way we build facilities at West Point. The old way was create an estimate for a project, raise those funds, turn the money over to USMA and then have the facility built. Bids on those projects typically were 40% higher than the estimates. AOG now manages the building of the facilities. They get the right to do it from USMA, manage the process and do get the costs down considerably. When the building is done, it is turned over to USMA. An example savings was building the new press box at Michie Stadium. AOG was able to have it build for $5million LESS than the bids that were being made to the academy. AOG is saving millions and getting things built faster than USMA was able to do it. We had a retention initiative briefing from Dave Lyle ’94 that was largely a repeat of what we learned last year but with actual numbers from the first run with year group 06. The overall goal was to get many soon to be officers to change their commitment from 5 active, 3 reserves to 8 years active by buying a guaranteed shot at grad school, guaranteed first post or branch of their choice. The program was a major success with a large number of USMA and ROTC cadets making the commitment. Numbers should be available when AOG posts the conference materials shortly.This left very little time for Joel Jeb to introduce himself as the new class support person and talk about the programs under his area. The next morning we had a briefing from Mike Mahan ’70 essentially on development (fund raising) 101. It was a very good briefing on how they do it, the staff and comparisons to other schools. We have major differences. Most schools use students for phone calls and the university president spends most of their time fund raising where the Supe and cadets cannot do that. Most universities exist entirely on fund raising while USMA gets money from congress. We raise less money that comparable universities but 34% of grads give which is significantly better than most schools. One major difference is we give mostly via class gifts and gifts given directly to a specific projects and most schools want the money to come in free of strings so they are free to use it as necessary. A few classes in the 80s have given unrestricted gifts which frees the Supe to use the money to use the money as necessary rather than wait until a need is identified and funds are raised. I think unrestrictive gifts are the way we all ought to start giving and hope I can talk my class into do that with our next gift.Our session with Mike lasted longer than expected so Geoff Louis ’64 had to give just a fast, high level view of AOG’s finances. Details will be posted on the web so I won’t go into any details. Mike and Geoff also provided a 75 to 100 page fund raising booklet and a CD that I have not had a chance to look at in detail yet. John Calabro ’68 talked very quickly about this year’s elections. Those emails have already gone out so I won’t go into detail on the election other than to reiterate that last year hundreds of votes were not counted because grads selected somebody other than John as their proxy and those other grads did not show up at the meeting to cast those votes. With no real choice in this year’s election that’s not much of an issue like it was in last year’s election where we had a choice at least for some of the Board of Director positions.Ellen Houlihan ’82 and Ted Stroup talked about governance. Much of this covered ground well covered in the past and will be up with the meeting notes soon. One thing they did cover is the need to continue to evolve the position of the advisors which remains somewhat nebulous right now. They talked about the changes to the nominating committee that establishes the selection of candidates and how most of the members of this committee are not members of the BoD or the Advisors. I skipped out of lunch to go shop at the cadet store and book store so I did not hear COL Douglas Boone’s presentation.After lunch VADM Norb Ryan from MOAA talked to us about legislative issues facing the military. It was very informative but I don’t have any specific notes so you can catch that briefing on the AOG’s notes when they get posted. We then broke out into break out sessions again and I went to the class sessions again. We had a general best practices discussion that talked about things like taking care of family members of our fallen classmates, fund raising ideas, memorial articles and general stuff like that.Alan Salisbury then did a presentation on the work of his Communications, Outreach and Marketing task force. They are looking at all the vehicles available, their constituencies and service providers available. There are no sacred cows and everything is apparently on the table. They are looking closely at what needs to be done and how it can be done at what service levels. For those who have looked for better AOG and WP-ORG cooperation this is the area will it will occur and Alan was very clear that WP-ORG is considered a significant service provider and vehicle for communications and that the graduate community could not communicate nearly as well as they do without WP-ORG. The conversations largely focused on how to continue to improve AOG communications and dispelled many of the long held notions like younger classes that are not actively engages and older classes that do not fully embrace email and the web. Saturday morning we had a final wrap up session to summarize our breakouts and to talk about ways to improve the conference before heading up to the Supe’s box to watch the acceptance parade. Besides the business the conference provided ample social time with a reception Thursday night and dinner Friday night and plenty of time at breakfast before the sessions. It was great to see old friends and meet others who I have met by email and worked with on various projects and spend time getting in touch with the LGL in the real world as well as I remain in touch with them in cyber space. |
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