By Frank J. Diekmann
CUToday.info turns one week old this week, and to celebrate credit unions around the world have decided to join together and stage International Credit Union Week. I would be remiss were I not to say thank you, you really shouldn’t have.
But I would be similarly remiss were I not to acknowledge the outstanding response since our launch; we were reasonably confident we had built a model of news and resource delivery that was going to be popular, we just didn’t realize it would be this popular, this fast.
Thanks to all of you who have spent time on CUToday.info, probed through all the various buckets of content that are available in THE boost, THE feature, THE ’tude, THE vault and more, and who have taken time to contribute ideas, content and feedback. We have a lot more planned, but collaboration is a foundation in CUToday.info, and we look forward to continuing to build this resource with your help.
Now, on to other news...
* The CUNA board has made pretty clear where it believes the trade association needs to be headed with its hiring of a former congressman as its new CEO. Or perhaps that was just the default position of a board borrowing a page from the American Bankers Association and choosing to focus on a (real or perceived) external threat rather than the bushel basket of thorny durian fruit that is the internal challenges.
In an interview with CUToday.info, the new CUNA CEO, Jim Nussle, made it clear he’s been charged by the board with advocacy (really, why else would you hire a former congressman for any job?). Advocacy, of course, is the $2 word for lobbying. But no one “lobbies” anymore, and the term is spat out in political attack ads and back-handed compliments with the same invective tone as “terrorist” and “doesn’t like football.” Nope, lobbying is out and advocacy is in, even if it’s the precisely same people doing precisely the same thing in precisely the same way. It’s just been repackaged, and if anyone knows who to repackage the same old, same old, fittingly, it’s Washington.
In weighing whom to hire for the CEO job, part of the debate had to be around insider with no connections/access vs. outsider with connections/access. After a long history of hiring from inside the family, credit unions got their first taste of just what a former politician (there is no actual cure) brings to the family dinner table when it hired Dan Mica in the late 1990s. Mica famously helped shepherd HR 1151 through Congress, a bill then Rep. Nussle of Iowa did not co-sponsor but did vote for.
Mica’s retirement led to the hiring of Bill Cheney, who brought about as strong an “insider” resume to the job as anyone could. Cheney has since packed up and returned to California, in the process joining the rare species of individuals who leave Washington of their own accord and without their names in headlines attached to words like “scandal” and “on a rail.”
The word is there were more than 100 candidates for Cheney’s old job, a mixture of insiders and outsiders, and a discussion for a separate column/blog sometime will need to be how strongly any women were considered for the post. CUNA’s board made clear what it sees as the primary role of the trade group when it hired Nussle, and only history will judge the wisdom of the choice, of course, even though it feels like the last victory by credit unions (or anyone else) in a gridlocked Congress was 1,151 years ago.
In the meantime, this week Nussle filled the #2 post at CUNA with Rich Meade, another long-time Hill veteran, meaning the Madison, mid-America roots of credit unions keep getting further than just 700 miles away. For credit unions, what all this means is some reflection is needed. CUs must ask themselves: Who are we? What are we all about? What are our real strengths?
For all the breathless exhortations at CU meetings about “revolutionary change!” change is most often evolutionary, slow and unnoticed, until… Credit unions, after all, are supposed to be a business model with a PAC attached, not a PAC with a business model.
At least those are the questions I would lobby for. Sorry, advocate.
Frank J. Diekmann is cooperator-in-chief at CUToday.info and can be reached at Frank@CUToday.info.