Over the past few months several people have urged me to start my own blog. I am in fact launching this, here early in 2006, in order to communicate – informally and personally – my latest thinking on issues I think are important to the successful governance, leadership, and management of the philanthropic and nonprofit sector.

This blog will provide an ongoing commentary, musings, suggested resources I find personally interesting, and new ideas I am trying out. It will also offer readers an opportunity to post their own thoughts and responses to what they read here.

As some of you know, I have been thinking a lot these past two years about how nonprofits undertake strategic planning; in fact, you could say I am obsessed with this issue. Our firm’s R&D effort in this area has been a great excuse for me to read about, ponder, and endlessly discuss nonprofit strategy. Now we are piloting some new ideas that can provide, I believe, a faster, more flexible, and more genuinely “strategic” approach to strategy. One thing that has become clear to me is that there is nothing magic about the standard three-year (or even a one-year) planning cycle. Let me leave you with this one thought, until next time —

If your current strategy is not driving success, you need a new one. However, if your strategy is working, but you still aren’t achieving the results you want, no amount of strategic planning will improve your results. In this case, it is really about better execution, efficiency, and discipline. Strategic planning is not “the solution” for every nonprofit, every three years.

Tags: nonprofit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 5:27 am and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.