About Me & This Page

I have spent my entire professional career in associations … serving both in staff and volunteer capacities.

The Power of Collaboration

I have always viewed the business of associations as the business of facilitating groups of individuals, united by a shared identity and a strong commitment to a cause, to accomplish things that they could not accomplish individually.

This is an inherently collaborative effort, bringing together people of diverse talents, experiences and needs, with all the rich potential and challenges such human interactions entail.

The Business Aspect

This requires a unique and sophisticated set of business competencies.　Although financial performance is not the underlying purpose of the corporation, it is impossible to achieve the association’s purposes without generating adequate financial and other resources.　 And the vision and goals of the organization mean nothing if they can not be translated into practical and executable plans.

The Higher Purpose

But there is also a powerful ethical component to the association’s activities.　While by definition the association exists to serve a “special interest” (a trade or profession), it must do so in a manner that is both consistent with the public good and maximizes the benefit realized by as many members of the served community as possible.

A Never Ending Journey

In the over thirty years I have spent exploring this uniquely challenging and rewarding field, I have never lost my passion and curiosity to understand better what makes associations work. I hope to share these reflections in this space, and welcome your comments and interactions.

Professional Biography

Mark J. Golden, FASAE, CAE, has spent his entire professional career in association leadership, guiding trade associations and professional societies of all sizes.

A transformative leader, he has set numerous organizations on the path to success, engaging volunteer leaders in identifying mission-driven strategic opportunities and building the business, staffing, and financial infrastructure needed to sustain operations and maximize impact.

As CEO of the Association for Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine (ADLM, formerly the American Association for Clinical Chemistry), he led extensive market research and the design and implementation of a brand repositioning that expanded membership and customer markets into laboratory-adjacent fields, creating new opportunities for revenue growth and mission impact. He also successfully guided the organization through a name change that reflected its broader brand and developed a five-year strategic plan with a detailed implementation roadmap to clarify priorities for advancing ADLM’s expanded mission and goals.

As CEO of the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), he helped the board identify the organization’s distinctive role in a crowded field of engineering associations as the “champion of professional licensure and ethics.” He revitalized NSPE’s professional practice and public policy programs by strengthening support for state society advocacy, coordinating work around key policy priorities, building new intra- and interprofessional coalitions, and creating robust national and state-specific resources on licensure, ethics, and professional practice. He also served as a leading national spokesperson for responsible professional licensure.

To create a sustainable operational foundation for these goals, he facilitated the design of an innovative membership model that financially and operationally integrated national and state membership across NSPE’s fully autonomous chapters. He built consensus and secured chapter approval, with 48 of 53 states and territories joining in the first year and 52 of 53 by the second.

As CEO of the National Court Reporters Association (NCRA), he led strategic efforts to unify the organization by building consensus among diverse stakeholders on the profession’s future direction. These efforts empowered the field’s expansion beyond court and deposition records into real-time captioning services. This involved the redesign of and securing funding for deployment of new educational curricula, as well as creating new association-based training systems, certifications, and professional development programs.

Earlier in his career, he focused on communications and government relations, first at the Association of Telemessaging Services International (ATSI) and later at the Personal Communications Industry Association (PCIA). He earned a reputation as a consensus builder who delivered practical legislative and regulatory results, helping a small industry segment shape regulatory, legislative, and standards outcomes that supported members’ business interests while advancing sound public policy.

He has successfully completed two association mergers: once in a CEO capacity, leading the merger of PCIA with the National Association of Business and Educational Radio; and once as a volunteer director, supporting the merger of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) with the Greater Washington Society of Association Executives.

As an ASAE volunteer, he contributed extensively to its Foundation’s research, including environmental trends and scanning publications. He played a key role in the landmark study Seven Measures of Success: What Remarkable Associations Do That Others Don’t, which applied Jim Collins’s Good to Great methodology to the association field. He later chaired both the Foundation’s research committee and its board.

He has chaired the ASAE “Power of A” public awareness campaign, its government relations membership section, Political Action Committee, Key Professional Associations Committee, the Fellows, and numerous other committees and task forces. He has also served on the ASAE Board and as Vice Chair of ASAE’s Executive Committee.

He is a Certified Association Executive (CAE) and ASAE Fellow and recipient of ASAE’s Key Award, ASAE’s highest honor.

In other volunteer service, he is president of the Wagner Society of Washington, D.C. and serves as its representative to the Richard Wagner Verband International. He is also a former director of the Catholic Disabilities Foundation.