By Barb Kachelski, CAE

By Sydney Finkelstein Welcome to CEO Network! I’m looking forward to opening your conference and sharing some of the lessons I’ve learned from studying why smart executives fail. As a preview, here are highlights from an article I wrote for the Winter 2003 issue of the London Business School’s Business Strategy Review: “Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful People”: To be spectacularly unsuccessful requires some very special personal qualities.

By Steve Williams 2005 will be a year like no other for credit unions. Over the past 10 years, credit unions have seen a wide variety of new opportunities open up: community charters, business lending, new delivery channels, CUSOs and expanded wealth management services. While the industry has succeeded in opening up its business powers, it has also opened up new, more difficult responsibilities for CEOs. When opportunity is wide open for small financial services organizations, the key becomes strategic focus.

By George Hofheimer, CAE

By Franck Schuurmans, Ph.D., CAE, & Michael Mavaddat

How do CU's create more value for your members while the industry promotes consumers to cherry pick products and services? I would like to hear from CU's that have other ideas rather than competeing on just price! Dave Craigen, CCE Powell River Credit Union Financial Group dave_craigen@prcu.com

NCUA held its Summit on Credit Union Capital on Oct. 19, where according to NCUA Chairman JoAnn Johnson, “All issues relating to capital for America’s credit unions [would] be on the table.” Here is Credit Union Journal's online account of the meeting:

As you no doubt have heard, NCUA Chairman JoAnn Johnson has announced a Summit on Credit Union Capital, where “All issues relating to capital for America’s credit unions will be on the table.” NCUA is inviting credit union officials from the Association of Corporate Credit Unions, CUNA, NAFCU, NASCUS, and the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions to participate in the Oct. 19 summit at NCUA headquarters. Plus individual comments can be submitted to regcomments@ncua.gov.

By Michael Neill, CSE

I heard a consultant say that a credit union sales and service culture is like the Loch Ness Monster. Many claim it exists but no one has actually seen it! Pretty funny, but an overstatement. Still, there are far more credit unions that continue working to differentiate themselves by processing faster and more accurately, than there are excellent examples of sales and service cultures in our movement. Given that credit unions are “built for service” why do we see few top-notch sales and service cultures?

By Henry Wirz Despite efforts by the Shapiro Group to raise money and award grants to credit unions with assets of less than $30 million, California Credit Union League Chairman Frank Michael just presented statistics confirming that smaller credit unions in the aggregate are underperforming on almost every measure of credit union financial performance. The Shapiro Group and others like it are not going to turn around the performance of small credit unions. Their problems run far deeper than anything The Shapiro Group can address.