Abstract: IMC USA continues to roll out new services to help you Get Smart, including more than 20 new courses through the IMC USA Academy for Professional Development, educational resources and content from our strategic partners, the IMC USA Grande Conference for Consulting to be held in Orlando this June and, with the rollout of the new website, online discussion forums and a resource library.

Our promise is to help each of our members Get Smart, Get Known and Get Business. For the next three weeks, I will describe services we provide in each of these areas. Today we give you access to ways to Get Smart.

Why We Focus on Get Smart
Professional associations should be efficient centers of learning to increase your professional skills, consulting techniques, and business insights. We commit to deliver professional development resources so you can fill gaps in your competencies and build new skills. We will not be the only place you go for education but we will create a complete reference base of content, links and means to find everything you need to be a competent and effective consultant. We recognize that we are starting on this process and it will take your contributions to complete it.

What We Currently Offer
We deliver education through chapter programs, the IMC USA Academy for Professional Development, conferences, the new web portal and through our partners. Links to many of these resources are listed at the end of this message.

Chapter Professional Development Programs: Our 25 chapters have regular professional development programs, seminars, and workshops. Some have websites, mentoring programs, newsletters and resource libraries. All have smart and experienced members who are willing to help you with consulting issues. Our plans for 2007 are to create a shared resource library so all members can access the best of what individual chapters have developed. For example, chapters like IMC Dallas and IMC Pacific Northwest have developed excellent program tracks that could be emulated by others.

IMC USA Academy for Professional Development: Begun in January of this year, we have built the Academy to now have 20 courses (mostly teleseminars) scheduled between now and March, including courses on practice management, marketing, business planning, security and consulting techniques. We have online registration, classes are usually one hour and member prices range between $49 and $129.

Taking Flight With Your Practice: This is a facilitated series (consisting of six two-hour workshops) on developing, delivering and disengaging from an engagement. Taking Flight will be offered by chapters starting in the spring of 2007.

IMC USA Conferences: We have two conferences each year—the venerable IMC USA Confab in late October in Reno, NV and the new Grande Conference for Consulting, to be held June 24-26 in Orlando, FL. The Grande Conference, with IMC USA as the primary sponsor, is being planned, marketed, managed and paid for by our new partner, the American Management Association, and held at the Disney Contemporary Hotel. Details on keynote speakers, workshops, golf and special meetings planned with the Disney management team will be announced in late December

IMC USA Web Portal: We are about to roll out our final website and work process improvement. We are developing a web portal to integrate member databases, consultant search, resource library, discussion forums, online certification and renewal, news feeds (like on current site) and more aggressive publicity and business resources. Chapters will be invited to host their sites, at no cost, under the main portal and share chapter-focused functionality including calendaring, payment processing, consultant search and links to chapter members. We are about to put the development out to bid and expect to roll out the new portal in the spring.

Partner Resources: We have created partnerships with several sources of professional education over the past few months. These partnerships will provide the basic content for members to develop new skills, new practice areas and new product revenue streams.

• The American Management Association offers IMC USA members free access to its AMA members-only resource areas, discounts on all its seminars, and access to business resources. Register on the AMA site for access at the link below.
• Vistage International has affiliated with IMC USA to connect its CEOs and chairs to the IMC network (discussed in an upcoming message) and is making its extensive management resource library available to IMC USA members, as well as the experience of being Vistage chairs and members.
  Business Source is a vendor of business book summaries, that will make it easier for members to keep up with trends and developments in business and management.
• Microsoft is providing IMC USA members with a free copy of its business organizing software OneNote ($99 value), which has saved me so much time and allowed me to be much more organized, that it makes me look smarter than I really am, thus qualifies as an IMC USA Get Smart resource. (as of 1/31/007, Microsoft has temporarily ceased offering the 2003 version; we are discussing a new agreement to offer the 2007 version)
• Harvard Business School Publishing/Harvard Business Review details are in discussion but at a minimum IMC USA members will receive discounts on HBSP/HBR content. They have also offered to contribute to our Grande Conference for Consulting.

How to Take Advantage of These Resources
Our primary access point for Get Smart resources will be the web portal, which will provide both content, tools and links to content by others. The IMC USA Professional Resources Evaluation Team (PRET), headed up by Dick Morgan, reviews materials for currency and appropriateness to include in our resource libraries. The following links will provide access to our growing set of resources to help you Get Smart.

IMC USA Chapters
http://www.imcusa.org/imc_usa_chapters
IMC USA Academy for Professional Development Course Listings
https://www.netforumondemand.com/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=imcusa&WebCode=EventList
Taking Flight With Your Practice Outline (PDF)
http://www.imcsocal.org/files/taking_flight_tc.pdf
IMC USA Confab
http://www.confabusa.org
Grande Conference for Consulting venue
http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/wdwi/en_CA/resorts/resortLanding?id=ContemporaryResortLandingPage_en_CA&count=4
IMC USA Online Discussion Forums (current site)
http://www.imcusa.org/forum
IMC USA News Feeds (current site)
http://www.imcusa.org/resources_and_tools
American Management Association
http://www.amanet.org/alliances/imc
Vistage International
http://www.VistageInternational.com
Business Source
http://www.thebusinesssource.com
Microsoft OneNote (temporarily on hold pending a new agreement with Microsoft)

IMC USA PRET - Professional Resources Evaluation Team
http://www.imcusa.org/resources_and_tools
PRET Guidelines (Word)
http://www.imcusa.org/PRETCommitteePolicies.doc

Sincerely,

Mark R. Haas CMC
IMC USA Board Chair
mhaas@imcusa.org

Next Week’s Preview: “How IMC USA Helps You Get Known”
IMC USA has significantly increased our focus in 2006 to help you Get Known, including aggressive marketing and branding tactics like placing IMC USA and CMC-focused articles in business media, press releases about IMC USA and the CMC, new website capabilities to raise your profile to clients, and an expanded consultant referral service. These are a direct response to requested CMC marketing and service priorities.