WWW.ALOA.ORG FEBRUARY/MARCH 2024 KEYNOTES 23 Get Published! IAIL members: Submit your articles for the Investigative Spotlight department. Send your information to Ross Squire at [email protected]. INVESTIGATIVE SPOTLIGHT Think Outside the Box O ur association (ALOA and IAIL) is facing unprecedented challenges. Your business might be the same. One might say, we all need to “think outside the box” to innovate ways to survive and flourish in uncertain times. But what does that mean exactly? Well, let me be provocative and say it means that we are doing anything but thinking outside the box if we are relying on two such tired, overused clichés. If we’re starting with “think outside the box,” that might be our first warning sign that we’re irrevocably trapped inside with unoriginal ideas. So, let’s free our minds. Let’s innovate. Let’s invent. Let’s identify our challenges — facing our association, our industry and your own businesses — and then open our minds to creative, effective and value-adding solutions that break us free from the clichés and the same way of looking at things that are limiting us. I’m announcing a contest. Help us, and help yourselves. Send me your most cre- ative and innovative ideas, preferably for the growth of IAIL, but I don’t want to put any limits on the ideas we might be able to generate. Any ideas that are valuable to our industry, our association (ALOA or IAIL) or even your own business will qualify. IAIL will give away three prizes for the top three submissions by April 15, 2024. First prize will be a one-year IAIL membership, and the second prize will be a new freshly revised CFL Manual (when it is finally released and published). Third prize (if we get so lucky to re- ceive three worthy submissions!!) will be a free IAIL class day at the ALOA Convention. The IAIL Board reserves the right to not award any prize, but if we use any of your ideas or officially recommend any of your ideas, we will award a prize! In my 40-plus years of locksmithing, I’ve met some of the most creative, inde- pendent, committed, inventive and “out- side-the-box” thinkers of any industry. Let’s have some fun and see what we can come up with. Send your thoughts to iailpresident@ aloa.org, and please put “No More Boxes” in the subject line! And thanks for all those who care enough to give it a shot. Happy Valentines Day, everyone! Clyde T. Roberson, CML, AHC, CPP, CMST, CFMST, AMKS, President, Inter- national Association of Investigative Locksmiths, [email protected] “Let’s identify our challenges — facing our association, our industry and your own businesses — and then open our minds to creative, effective and value- adding solutions that break us free from the clichés.”
