OK, I admit I have been AWOL for the past two weeks and not posted a thing here.

Why? Well, my principal “excuse” is that I have been hard at work editing my new book, due out in early spring 2008 from Fieldstone Alliance. The title is The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution. It is about different and (I believe) better ways than traditional strategic planning for nonprofits to form and implement strategies.

The first section of the book covers the problems we are all familiar with in the traditional approach to strategic planning and defines strategy, a term that’s overused to the point of being meaningless.

The book presents a non-planning approach to organizational strategy. This is an approach that La Piana Associates has developed and refined over the past few years in our Strategy Formation project, a major foundation-funded R&D initiative. We’ve tested this approach with more than 25 pilot nonprofits around the country and with just as many of our clients.

I outline this approach in step-by-step instructions for how to form your organization’s identity statement–a concept and process we developed in the project. The identity statement is the touchstone for all future strategy work of your organization.

After forming the identity statement, the nonprofit determines its “strategy screen.” This is the decision criteria you will use to determine what strategy to implement to address the primary strategic question–what we call the “big question”–your nonprofit faces at the present time.

With your identity statement, strategy screen, and big question in hand, it’s time to form your strategy, make sure it meets the strategy screen criteria, and implement it. This is a practical process that meets the nonprofit’s need to form and implement strategy in “real time.”

The book walks you through this process in an easy-to-follow manner.

The final section of the book includes dozens of practical, easy-to-use tools that a nonprofit can use as needed and based on its particular situation to enhance its capacity for strategic thinking and action.

The book is already creating a bit of a stir. I am getting lots of requests to speak on the topic, even though the book is not even on the press. No pressure!

Anyway, that is why I have not been blogging.

If you’d like more information, we have a recent article on our Strategy Formation project and the tools I mention above posted on our website. Go to www.lapiana.org and click on the link to the article (Strategy Formation Project Findings). It gives you an update on the findings of the project, which are the foundation of my book. Our summer 2007 e-newsletter also discussed the project’s findings and some of the tools we’ve developed. There’s a link to the e-newsletter on our home page, too.

Please share your comments on these concepts with me.

Founder’s Syndrome. We all have heard about it and we know it when we see it, but what exactly is it? Well, let me describe a few of the symptoms of this all-too-common malady.

First, Founder’s Syndrome sufferers are not limited to founders. Any long-time successful leader is susceptible. By long-time, I mean someone who has been there so long that no one can remember the person before him or her, if there was one. As one of my kids said the other day: “Dad you’re so old, when you were in school they didn’t even have history!”

Regardless of the person’s tenure, they are seen as THE LEADER. Not the recent leader or the new leader or the latest leader, just THE LEADER. It is also essential that the person suffering from Founder’s Syndrome (the founder) be largely successful in their job. Success conveys power, which is essential to the condition. Describing someone as a long-time failed leader may sound like an oxymoron, but it is likely that such a person would not have much power or influence, which should inoculate him or her against the condition.

The next consideration is the founder’s self-view. The person with Founder’s Syndrome usually does not see much difference between him- or herself and the organization; it all kind of blurs. “What is good for me must be good for the organization” — is the mindset. This leads to a mixing of personal and professional motivations, and sometimes to improprieties

The next symptom is inflexibility. “If we have always done things a certain way, I don’t really want to hear about a better way. It doesn’t matter if it is better, it is just different so I don’t want to hear it.”

Founders with the condition usually have surrounded themselves with board members who are friends or sycophants. Over time, filling a board with such “friendlies” makes for a sinecure. It is very hard for an upstart movement to challenge, let alone oust, an incumbent who is surrounded by a lap dog board (no offense Cody). Anyone speaking up is usually ostracized, fired, or made miserable enough to leave.

The result of such a situation is usually less than optimal functioning on many levels, although the founder’s long term relationships may keep the money coming in. Negative results include high staff turnover, difficulty recruiting independent-minded board members, and a general level of misery in the organization’s offices.