News Detail

Advancing Our Strategic Plan

5/1/2014

To be named the 91st President of ACI and appointed to represent the extraordinary people who make up the Institute and concrete professionals around the world is an honor beyond words.

My personal journey to this destination started many years ago. I was urged to serve as Vice Chair of a convention in New Orleans and received excellent advice that I should attend a convention to understand the process. So I attended and sat in on my first technical committee meeting. As the people introduced themselves at that first meeting, I quickly recognized some of the names in the room as giants in the industry. I had seen their names on textbooks and on that mysterious committee that wrote the building code. And I thought I really could not fit in with this group.

But they welcomed me, and embraced my opinions and input. Immediately I realized that ACI was truly an amazing group of people. Soon after, I joined multiple committees. And so it began.

That was the past and how I got here, but now there is so much to look forward to in this coming year. Our new tagline, “Always Advancing,” truly reflects our goals for the future.

As part of our Strategic Plan, we have four pillars: Engagement, Outreach, Structure, and Leadership. Over the course of the year, we’ll take steps under each pillar to advance the Institute to reach concrete professionals, regardless of where they are in our global community.

Under Engagement, our goal is to increase opportunities for professional growth. Let’s reinvent and rethink the means and delivery methods for our educational products and make them more relevant than ever. Let’s see how we can team up with our industry partners and chapters to distribute new educational products. Let’s also strengthen the relationships between ACI and its chapters and their members. There are plans to use Concrete International to elevate the stature and exposure of our ACI chapters. We can develop a more appropriate system to deliver ACI publications to chapter members. Let’s work to establish a framework to enable chapters to pool funds toward student scholarships or charitable activities, thus engaging our Chapter members beyond their local area.

Under the pillar of Outreach, let’s actively seek opportunities to advance national and global outreach. One example, discussed extensively by the International Advisory Committee, is to establish a local presence in a non-North American location. To start that initiative, we need to investigate partnering with other organizations on their international shows, do research to establish criteria, and identify individuals or entities in regions to act as ACI’s representative.

Under the pillar of Leadership, we need to think about how we can proactively gather and share information on transformational ideas, practices, and technologies. We need to consider how to develop more programs in languages other than English to meet the needs of the global community. And that task will require us to evaluate new business models to determine what translations should be produced and how these are brought to market.

And finally, for the Structure pillar, we have to structure ACI and dedicate resources to quickly develop or adapt programs, products, and services. We are starting to look at ways to develop and process more non-volunteer- and staff-based deliverables to bring the needed technical information to the marketplace in a very user-friendly manner. This may be a different approach than our traditional volunteer-based products, but make no mistake—our dedicated volunteer base is still the center of bringing the needed technical expertise to the table. That role will be more vital than ever before.

And with all of these goals, under the leadership of First Vice President Sharon Wood, we are already working on an operational “Dashboard” that will allow the Board to evaluate the health of the Institute and general organizational trends. Many of these goals are related to past presidential objectives and actually continue their work.

It’s going to be challenging, but I’m confident we will meet the challenge with the help of our Board, our active committee members, our engaged chapters, and our partners worldwide. It promises to be an exciting year.

William E. Rushing Jr.