Visiting With CEO Guitarist Joe Moore And The Leadership Of IHRSA
Monday, August 15, 2011 
Upon the advice of many, including my partner and friend Robert Dyer, Sal Pellegrino and others, to learn more about the pulse of the health club industry, I headed up to Boston this week to sit down with the President and CEO of IHRSA, Joe Moore. Representing thousands of health clubs around the world and being the voice of the health club industry in general is no small job. However, in speaking with people like Joe Moore, Pam O'Donnell (pictured above with Joe and I), Meredith Poppler, Helen Durkin and others, I continue to discover a lot more about the thinking behind the organization that I'd like to share and of course hear back from you on. I also understand the importance of why people like you and I need to do more for this organization in order to help it succeed.
As way of background, for those that do not know, Joe Moore has been CEO of IHRSA officially for five years but his background in fitness goes way back. As a former police officer and fitness enthusiast, he founded the Dayton Nautilus Health Club in 1969. 35 years and 10 locations latter he sold out in 2005 to FitWorks (check out this interesting article on Joe from 1985 to learn more). Joe was out of the health club business but soon would find his new place leading the charge at IHRSA.
I did my research in advance of our talk and learned that Joe played a mean guitar riff. Being fellow musicians gave us something to really talk about (watch Joe play guitar at IHRSA in 2010 with the Board Of Director). That made our visit all the more enjoyable and I found Joe to be quite a personable guy.
Anyway, after an initial chat and sharing thank you's and the like, I asked, "What can I do to help?". Joe's view was simple in saying "Bryan we just need to get more people to move". This thinking is consistent with much of Joe's writing and while I won't go into details of our visit in the interest of confidences, our exchange was indepth and insightful.
For those of you who follow my writing, I believe the health club industry is in the midst of a massive evolution and navigating that change will result in a lot of upheavel with some winning and some losing. Regardless, it was engaging and enjoyable to see the leadership of IHRSA and visit with my musical friend Joe Moore. After talking I felt better about being able to make a greater contribution to the health club industry which I and so many of my friends and colleagues love.
Tell me, Bryan O'Rourke, what are your views on IHRSA ? Are you making the level of contrbution you'd like to ? Why or why not ? How can we make IHRSA a more effective membership organization that can help advance the health club industry and fitness in general ? Thanks for sharing your views and thank you Joe, Pam, Helen and Meredith among all of you at IHRSA for doing what you do and taking time out of your busy day to visit.
Reader Comments (4)
Hi Bryan. Thanks for the opportunity to comment. As the CEO of Fitness Australia, I can understand the issues confronting IHRSA and the need for the fitness industry to be more engaged with and supportive of their industry associations around the world. I understand how hard the folks at IHRSA work to lead and represent this great industry, because we do the same in Australia. From my perspective, people in our industry do not understand the true power and influence of ASSOCIATING with each other through their ASSOCIATION. We have some extremely influential industry associations in Australia and what makes them so influential is the tremendous support that they get from their stakeholders, particularly the leading organisations in their industry or profession.
By associating, industry's can arrive at agreed, well thought out policy positions to take to government to affect real change. By associating, industry's can develop fantastic promotional campaigns that are beyond the financial reach of individual organisations and can get key messages out to the public. By associating, industry's can unite to address common threats or take advantage of certain opportunities. If our industry remains fragmented, individually focused and not prepared to arrive at common positions on important strategic issues, it will not get the value from the association that it should.
In Australia, the influence of one particular industry association was such that it helped to remove a Prime Minister from office. You can bet that the Members of that organisation were highly engaged with their industry association!
Good article. I had the pleasure of working for Joe in Ohio for over 10 years and consider him to be one of most intelligent and influential persons I've known in my life. His personal convictions in life have led him to be right where he needs to be to lead such change.
Lauretta, as always I am thankful for sharing your views. I particularly found your thought that, "If our industry remains fragmented, individually focused and not prepared to arrive at common positions on important strategic issues, it will not get the value from the association that it should" quite relevant to today.
Robin, I am glad that knowing Joe Moore as you do that you'd take time out to share your experience.
Thank you both.
Bryan
Thanks for the sensible critique. Me & my neighbor were just preparing to do a little research on this. We got a grab a book from our area library but I think I learned more from this post. I'm very glad to see such great information being shared freely out there.