Ever feel like the situation is stacked against your association? What do you do? According to one CEO, you can simplify your focus and gain leverage. That and more in today’s Lunchtime Links:

Reshape the conversation: Eric Lanke of the National Fluid Power Association explains how he simplified a situation that put his organization in a leadership role and ultimately gained control. “In reducing the complexity down to what I viewed as the most salient realities,” he claims, “a new sense of clarity arose in my handling of the issue, and with it, a heightened ability to act with confidence and purpose.”

The value of collaboration: Jeff De Cagna’s latest entry in his Associations Unorthodox series focuses on collaboration, which he says could help reduce costs if done well. “Instead of concentrating their people in cubicles in Washington, DC, Chicago, or New York,” he writes, “associations can equip and deploy staff professionals as part of the new mobile workforce, with the intent of nurturing more meaningful stakeholder connections at the most local level possible.” This ties in with our piece on telecommuting last week.

Web giants work together: Remember the browser wars? Back in the late ’90s, Netscape and Microsoft spent months one-upping one another in an effort to gain marketshare, creating a few questionable features (frames, the <blink> tag) but ultimately putting a long-term crimp in web browser innovation. It took a while, but all of the major browser creators have joined forces to ensure this never happens again, launching a new site, WebPlatform.org, as a clearinghouse of the latest HTML-related technologies.

Old guard, new tricks: Who says established organizations can’t think like a startup. Blogger and Edelman exec Steve Rubel points out Atlantic Media’s startup-like new publication, Quartz, which has shrugged off much of its parent company’s legacy in favor of bold decision-making: “Quartz shows that you can, in fact, create and cultivate a digitally native, fearless culture inside a 155 year-old larger company,” he notes. “They are taking big risks. And I believe this will help them compete. However, they also need to ensure they don’t create two cultures and competing factions that grow to resent each other. I bet they will make it work.” Think you can pull off a similar reinvention?

See anything interesting today? Let us know in the comments.

(TMG archive photo)