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<< back to the 2004 archive listing << Food Protection Trends President's Perspective “The future is certain” Charles F. Kettering, the great American inventor whose innovations include the electronic cash register, the spark plug, safety glass, the automatic transmission, and freon for refrigerators and air conditioners once said, “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.” I think this is a great way to look at the future and one in which we all should embrace a little more often. I am pleased to tell you that your Executive Board is keenly interested in helping to define and shape the future of your Association. Earlier this year the Executive Board, along with IAFP staff, participated in a planning session facilitated by Warren Dunham of Warren Dunham Associates. The focus of this planning session was to look into the future to see where we would like IAFP to be in the year 2010. What are the accomplishments and goals we envision having accomplished over the next six-year planning horizon? We all began the session by listing our expectations of the exercise. We then took time to look back through the history of IAFP, summarizing the accomplishments and highlights achieved over the decades since our inception in 1911. We then looked at IAFP in our present state and developed a list of trends, impacts, and strengths as we currently see them. We then fast-forwarded ourselves to the year 2010 and projected our dreams of where we want to be as an organization at that time. I can tell you that it was an exciting, provocative, and fun exercise! There were a lot of great ideas expressed such as growing our membership to over 5,000 members, having at least 50 Affiliate organizations around the world, holding meetings outside of North America, and growing the Foundation Fund to over one million dollars, just to name a few. From this comprehensive list of ideas, our focus was condensed into the following five major themes: · International Issues Specific aims and milestones were defined for each of these major themes with the objective of achieving IAFP’s desired future state by the year 2010. Space limitations preclude me from delving into the specifics of each major theme. However, the output of this joint exercise was to develop a living, ongoing planning framework that will help to guide your Executive Board in the future to make decisions and policy consistent with an overall cohesive strategy and vision. I feel extremely satisfied with the outcome of this planning session. I can assure you that your Association does, indeed, have a future! Now, I know how profound that must sound to you… but the point I’m trying to make is that with your current and future leadership, I strongly believe IAFP has a very bright future. With your help and participation we can achieve that future together. The poet T. S. Eliot once wrote: “Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.”
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