Amy Acker, president of APTi (Association of Psychological Type International) took some time to sit down with us and go over her Letter From The President, published to APTi membership.

PRESIDENT’S LETTER

February 16, 2016

Dear APTi Members:

Happy New Year!  It is hard to believe we are a month into our 2016 year already and I hope that it has started off well for all of you.  I am looking forward to a productive and fun year serving as the 37th President of APTi.  I have had the good fortune since I joined the APTi Board in 2013 to watch the role modeling of three former presidents, Linda Berens, Susan Nash and last year Maryanne DiMarzo lead this organization with such great passion for serving our community, with such great commitment to forwarding the work of psychological type and with such generosity of their time and energy to this organization in general.   It is my personal goal and commitment to continue that legacy.

We have a seasoned group of professionals returning to the Board this year and several of them are in new roles.  Our newest member is Doug Woodworth who joins us as Director of Finance.  Please go to the APTi web site (www.aptinternational.org) if you are interested in the board members and their backgrounds.  As a board, I view our chief responsibility to not only lead an agenda that creates satisfaction for our membership but to also preserve and accelerate the organization.  I am confident that our board is not only committed to this but also up to the task – and there is much work to be done!

The Executive Committee of the Board spent a weekend planning session together in mid-January, heads down – aligning on our 2016 agenda and priorities.  An important point and distinction that I want to make is that I purposefully did not call it a “strategy” session because as I shared with the board, it is not my intent to call a new “strategic play” or direction for this year.  The incredibly hard work and great work that Maryanne lead the team through last year to create our new strategic direction, value proposition and values will remain – this year’s task is to ensure that we bring that value proposition to life in everything that we do – and I would add with execution excellence!!  To remind everyone, our value proposition “is to be the independent voice of type and serve as the standard bearer for psychological type lighting and enlightening ones’ journey towards type expertise…..”  I am hoping that these words sound familiar because they are part of our Mission Statement and Values.  Again, I would invite you all to visit our web site if you would like to read the entire Mission Statement and Values.

I would like to share with you our priorities for 2016 in no particular order as all are important:

1.  Better and more targeted communication with our members.  We will be launching a new membership management system on March 1st.   This will include a new front end, re-designed web site and a backend membership portal that will allow us to interact with our members and them with us with more ease.  This will be our single largest investment in our infrastructure this year and most likely in the next few years.  A lot of work is already underway and remains to be done and we are so excited to announce this!

2. Better understanding of our members’ needs and concerns – this is something that the entire board is so passionate about.  As such, we will be doing a “Membership Survey” sometime mid-year.  We have a wonderfully, diverse membership.  Some of our members join for personal passion and development, some join to contribute to forwarding the research and thinking in the area of type,