From the President: Managing Growth

by Mavis A. Walters One of the major challenges facing the CAS now is coping with our tremendous growth over the past several years. In some ways we may be in danger of becoming a victim of our own success! CAS membership has grown approximately 50 percent over the last five years and there is no indication that our growth will diminish any time soon. As a result, I think it’s important that we do not take for granted that the way we have done things in the past is necessarily the right way to conduct our affairs in the future.

Mavis A. Walters, 1998 CAS President, officially receives the gavel from 1997 President Robert A. Anker

For example, we all know that the commitment of CAS members to our Society is one of our key strengths. And that commitment is demonstrated by the number of volunteers working on CAS activities.

The 1997-1998 Participation Survey asking for committee volunteers brought in 330 responses.

Procedures call for committee or task force chairpersons to contact all the members who indicated that they were very interested and willing to serve if asked to join a particular committee. The chairpersons are supposed to make those calls to interested members even if no positions are currently available on the committee.

Some of the feedback from the most recent survey indicated that these procedures are not always followed and that we have some very dissatisfied members who are becoming skeptical about the CAS leadership’s commitment to the members.

I believe it is very important that we address these concerns because of the critical importance of a strong volunteer base to the continued success of the CAS. For this reason we have set up a special Task Force on Volunteer Resources chaired by CAS President-Elect Steve Lehmann. The task force will review the actual use of the participation survey by committee chairpersons and the success in placing volunteers. The task force will also determine whether we need new procedures to make sure that they are responsive to the members who complete the survey.

My own sense is that there may be a tendency on the part of some committee chairpersons to select as new members those actuaries that they already know, or who are known to other committee members—sort of an "old boy" or "old girl" network. If this is the case then we need to stir things up a bit, to give new members a fair chance to participate.

I am afraid that there may also be some "geographic preference" taking place, although getting any statistics on this is difficult. Are volunteers from the West Coast not selected because of a concern that they won’t be able to attend meetings very frequently? How about volunteers from Bermuda? It seems to me that, if those members do volunteer, then committee chairpersons should not be ignoring them based on their own perceptions. I am not saying that I know this is happening—just that it may be a possibility that cannot be ignored.

Our increasing membership base provides both a challenge and an opportunity. The obvious challenge is to attract and retain members’ interest in becoming active participants in CAS affairs. The opportunity may be to expand the traditional charge given to our committees or to establish new committees to take advantage of the increasing diversity of our members’ practice areas and thereby expand the scope of CAS activities. And I am sure there are many other possibilities.

If you have any thoughts on how we can make the process work better for all CAS members, please let me hear from you. And I know Steve Lehmann would be interested in your ideas as well.