Check your mailbox for the Trends In Agriculture brochure and your e-mail inbox for upcoming Rural Lifestyle Quizzes.

For this year’s Trends In Agriculture meeting, we are excited about the outstanding line-up of speakers that will be joining us. Take a minute to meet the Trends in Agriculture kick-off session speaker below.

Frank Schuurmans, Decision Strategies International, kick’s off the Trends meeting with Testing Your Current Strategy.

Most organizations already have strategies and tactics in place. But is your current strategy ‘future-proof’? In this type of engagement, Schuurmans focuses on different external future scenarios that might unfold and then test how your current strategy would fare under these different scenarios. He then helps you identify which areas of your strategy might require adjustment and monitoring as the future unfolds. Most companies pursue fragile strategies that will not easily survive a shift in how the wind is blowing. Many organizations have optimized their strategy for the present, not the future! Inadvertently, they have sacrificed long-term prosperity for short-term gain. He will assess how vulnerable your strategy is to external change, competitive forces and shifts in consumer demand.

Franck Schuurmans is a Senior Consultant and the Director of Non-Profit Practices for Decision Strategies International. He is a highly acclaimed, dynamic speaker and author of numerous influential industry reports. Dr. Schuurmans works both with corporate clients as well as with leading non- profit organizations. His areas of expertise are retail finance, governance and the non-profit sector, with a special interest in executive training workshops, board governance and strategy development.

Schuurmans received his MA from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. As a Fulbright Fellowship recipient, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. He taught there for several years as a full-time faculty member, and conducted research.

Until 2002 he was the senior vice president of Business and Professional Development for the Credit Union Executives Society (CUES) in Madison, Wisconsin. At CUES he was in charge of all research and professional development, playing a critical role in transforming CUES into the industry’s thought leader. Specifically, he helped expand the CUES-CEO Institute by working closely with several leading academic institutions, such as Berkeley, Cornell and Wharton. This Institute has become the industry gold standard in executive education, with over 500 alumni in senior positions. Franck is a Certified Association Executive (CAE).

With Prof. Paul Schoemaker and others he most recently co-wrote 2010 Scenarios for Credit Unions. He is also the co-author of various Industry Scenario reports including: “Scenarios for the Future of Human Resources Management,” commissioned by the Society of Human Resource Management; “2020: The Future of the Legal Industry:” “The Long and Winding Road, Histories of Aging and Aging Services in America, 2006-2016” and “Memories of the Future, Scenarios for the Life Insurance Industry.” Schoemaker and Schuurmans jointly wrote, “Opportunity in Uncertainty: Techniques for turning an Unpredictable Future to your Advantage,” published in Association Management.

Schuurmans is a frequent speaker at conferences and meetings throughout North America and Europe. He is a periodic guest lecturer at the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and at The European Centre for Executive Development (CEDEP) at INSEAD in Paris, one of Europe’s leading business schools. Dr. Schuurmans interests are in strategic planning, decision-making, innovation and corporate governance.

Leader Schedule at Trends In Agriculture
The following events will take place for NAMA Leaders at Trends in Agriculture:

Monday, November 10 ~ 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Executive Committee Meeting

Tuesday, November 11 ~ 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 Noon
Board of Directors’ Meeting – Board Members include:

• Chapter Presidents
• Regional Directors
• Executive Committee
• Immediate Past National President

Tuesday, November 11 ~ 12:15 – 1:45 p.m.
Chapter Leader Workshop – this workshop is hosted by the Regional Directors. All chapter presidents are encouraged to go to the workshop, however, if a president is not available to attend, another leader for the chapter may attend in their place.

Sponsorship Opportunities are still available for Trends In Agriculture, to view a list of available sponsorships and to sign up, visit http://www.nama.org/trends/sponsorship.htm or contact Jenny Pickett at [email protected].

For more information on Trends In Agriculture, visit http://www.nama.org/trends/index.htm. Remember, everyone who registers by the early cut off date (October 27) will be entered in a drawing for a complimentary registration to the 2009 Agri-Marketing Conference in Atlanta, April 15-17, 2009!