My favorite quote on strategy is from the great Henry Mintzberg, business guru, and author of The Rise an Fall of Strategic Planning:“The words ‘strategy’ and ‘planning’ should never be used in the same sentence.” He goes no to explain that this is because the rigorous analytics of planning kill the creative and constant sensing of the environment that comprises strategy
2005 saw the arrival of Richard P. Chait, William P. Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor‘s new book: Governance as Leadership. Definitely worth the read. However, it started me wondering, why are we so unhappy with our typical nonprofit board? Is it - as recent, thoughtful people such as these argue - that our conception of boards is inadequate or just plain wrong, or is it, as it often occurs to me, that we often don’t do a very good job of managing, motivating and leading our boards?
I spent 16 years as a nonprofit executive director and I had my share of bad board moments, but, by and large, it was a great board. We raised money, we made decisions. We grew to serve 4,000 kids a year. The board consistently supported me, but it never forgot to critically question management’s plans, suggest we were going too fast, and generally put the brakes on when needed. It was a relationship they took seriously in part because we, management, took it seriously. It was far from perfect, but it was farther still from dysfunctional. I am not taking credit for this – the organization had a great board before I arrived, and now, many years after my departure, the new executive director tells me he still has a great board. Is it a board culture? Plain ol’ good luck? I don’t know.
If I had to guess, and I have had lots of years to think about this, I would say this board has been successful through a combination of everyone generally keeping the mission first in mind in decision-making, keeping any private agendas or squabbles out of the board room, trusting management, but keeping on top of things by reading everything and asking lots of questions (trust but verify). For its part, management has always given the board the information it needs to make good decisions, in plain English. We never tried to hide anything. As one board member used to say “On this board you know you’ll hear bad information first from David.” Also, we expected the board to work well. Maybe that last point is the key.
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.
I have been reading a wonderful book from the early 90’s that I just was handed: David Maister’s Managing the Professional Services Firm. I highly recommend it to anyone in a consulting firm serving nonprofits. If you are a solo practitioner consultant, just read the early sections, they are still useful. I haven’t yellow-highlighted a book this heavily since grad school! He gives very specific and concrete advice on how to develop business, how to manage staff, and how to think about the whole complex billing equation. I kept having the feeling that he worked in my firm, he described our situation so clearly.
Recently I wrote an entry that raised some questions – here it is again:
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.
The point I was trying to make (maybe not so successfully) is that every problem you may face in running a nonprofit is not necessarily “strategic.” An organization can have a sound strategy, but still be failing in some significant way.
For example, a child care provider could pursue a strategy of growth to dominate the local market for services. Perhaps it hopes to achieve a scale that allows it to have a voice in local policy. The strategy could succeed marvelously – the organization grows, in fact becomes the largest provider of child care services in its community, and begins to attract the attention of policy makers. At the same time, however, it could be failing to engage parents in a significant way, or maybe its billing system is outdated and prone to mistakes, which parents find aggravating. The disengagement or estrangement of parents could lead to strategic problems down the road – such as the growth of a competitor – but the solution to this problem is not to readdress the organization’s strategy!
In this example, the problem is not an ineffective strategy but inefficient operations. The parent education program may need attention, or perhaps it is time for the billing system to be upgraded. These operational fixes will enhance the organization’s success. It is essential to separate strategic challenges that require a strategic response from operational challenges. In fact, in a field where all competitors are pursuing pretty much the same strategy, or parallel strategies with equal success, the difference between the organization that is best able to meet community needs and the rest of the pack may be that it has the best systems, the best staff, and the best execution.
Maister (see previous entry) has an interesting idea about strategy for professional services firms that I think has some applicability to nonprofits. He thinks that rather than a group of elites coming up with a high level plan (which he says never gets implemented anyway), try getting together the people who actually work together, in teams, with a coach from management, and ask them to articulate three-month goals in four key areas.
I have been fooling around with his four areas and have adapted them to a nonprofit context. Try this:
Assemble natural teams within your nonprofit, if you are big enough to have them. This could be program-by-program, site-by-site, or the whole board and staff in a small organization. Each team is a group that works together naturally in their daily work. Give each team four blank work plans (action, responsible, due date, etc.), each with a different heading as follows:
Increase Customer Satisfaction (which could be defined as clients, funders, members, etc., whoever the primary customers of that team are)
Increase Our Skills (which includes board or staff development that is needed to keep or develop a competitive advantage)
Improve Execution/Productivity (which means our systems, or how we carry out our work)
Win New Contracts, Donors, Business (which means growth of the activity or funding)
Come up with specific things that each team can do in three months in each area. The coach is not leading the process, but helping the folks come up with their work plan. The coach is also drawing connections between different work teams where similarities or possible collaboration between groups seem like a good idea.
The coach returns in three months to see how the team is doing and to develop a new work plan. This is an ongoing process that focuses on action as a way to strategy – the ultimate incremental approach. It stems from the belief that real live action, at the front line level, is what matters. Not too radical an idea, I believe.
In the January/February 2006 Atlantic Monthly there is an interesting piece by P.J. O’Rourke (Two Cheers for Hypocrisy, pp. 154-6) reporting results from various surveys of teenage Americans’ views on public policy issues. O’Rourke’s main point is that kids may not be fully forthcoming with poll takers, and he gives us many humorously incongruous examples to support this contention. To me, the most striking thing about all these statistics is that, by and large, teenagers tend to have the same politics and values as their parents. I am a child of the 60’s, when we, the children of short-haired, narrow-tie, toe-the-line, World-War-II-Greatest-Generation parents seemed to have rejected most if not all of our parents’ value system.
But maybe not – we got married, jobs, mortgages, kids of our own, and at middle age we seem to be treading similar paths to the previous generation. With one perhaps central difference - The activist generation of the 60’s has become the nonprofit generation in middle age. We have led the unparalleled growth of nonprofits during our life times, which itself has been fueled by LBJ’s War on Poverty, and the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Native Americans Rights, Animal Rights and Environmental Conservation movements (among others). While many of us work directly in the nonprofit world, many more are involved on a voluntary basis. We give money and time to myriad causes (both social and political), we volunteer at church, at our kids’ schools, and at the neighborhood food pantry. We coach soccer, we tutor slow readers, and we serve as trustees on foundation, public charity, and even homeowner association boards. The list of our causes and commitments is endless.
And what of our kids? The next generation seems indeed to be carrying on our activist tradition. High schools are requiring community service for graduation, and colleges are increasingly looking for kids who have committed themselves to causes, not just grades. I recently looked through a stack of catalogues offering summer community service programs for teens, programs that would take them all over the country and the world – literally hundreds of offerings. There must be a huge market of kids who want to spend their summers making the world a better place (and incidentally learning about this diverse but shrinking world) instead of working on their tans.
So, perhaps the pollsters are right. The current crop of kids does hold its parents’ values. They too will be activists. That’s just fine with me.
For the last week I have been traveling with my family to visit small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. My oldest daughter is interested in “going East” for college, and I thought, slyly, “Well, let her experience it in February, and she’ll decide to stay in California, nearer to home.” No such luck – the weather was cold enough to feel different from home but entirely bearable. In fact, my plan backfired: she now feels certain she can handle winter in the East.
One of the goals of colleges visits is to gain an understanding of what students are interested in, what kind of internships they undertake during the summers, and what jobs they seek at graduation. We were happy to find that there was widespread interest in the nonprofit sector. We discovered numerous campus clubs with political and humanitarian interests, and a preponderance of internship opportunities in local, national and even international nonprofits. Bulletin boards invited students to nonprofit job fairs in nearby big cities, and our student tour guides, often graduating seniors, were uniformly socially minded. They reported, for example, plans to work in an environmental nonprofit in Berkeley, a two-year commitment to Teach for America, and a move to New York City to work on peace issues.
It was a good trip. My oldest daughter found the college of her dreams (if she can get in), her younger sister got a preview of what will be available when her turn comes, and Mary and I were filled with a desire to do it all over again - this time not at the wonderful but humongous Cal Berkeley, where we met, but at one of these small college communities of activists and learners. I also came away impressed by the quality of real, thoughtful social commitment on these campuses, and with renewed hope that my daughters’ generation will do more than fill our shoes as the current generation of nonprofit leaders retires from the sector; they will go further than we have, and actually solve some of the ongoing social, environmental and political problems of our troubled world.
Yesterday, as the college tour brought us to Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to visit some of the local “tourist sites.” These sites are completely different than, say Graumann’s Chinese Theatre or Disney World; these places recall real-life inspiring stories in our own not-to-distant history. We went to Independence Hall, which I had simply wandered into once a few years ago when in town on business, and which now requires a security screening process that makes a trip through the airport look like a cakewalk. Later, leaving Mary and the girls to their favorite pastime – shopping – I went to the Constitution Center, a Smithsonian-quality showcase of the founding document of our nation. I am a history buff so this was all just my sort of thing, yet there was something troubling in the glorious recounting the basic tenets of our social contract.
When the bright and articulate U.S. Park Ranger who gave the Independence Hall tour listed some of the groundbreaking elements of our new constitution and Bill of Rights – the right to a speedy trial, to face your accusers, to a lawyer, to not be held without trial, to avoid cruel and unusual punishment – I experienced both an incredible pride and genuine wonder at what the framers devised in the 18th century, and a corresponding horror at what our current government has forgotten. Later, I complimented the young ranger/tour guide on an outstanding presentation, and asked her how she could describe to us all those “inalienable rights” knowing that our government now feels it can ignore them at its own whim – imprison both citizens and aliens without charges, for indefinite periods of time, with limited or no access to an attorney, torture them, and quite possibly even kill them. Her response surprised me. She said that she hoped, by reminding people of the essential truths of the founding documents, they might begin to question their government, which is the most essential right of all.
Here’s to the U.S. Park Service!
This January I spent two weeks working with small nonprofits in Hawaii as part of our strategy formation research, and also doing a session for a leadership program we offer to nonprofit leaders in the state.
At one grassroots organization–small budget, 5 staff, storefront location–my colleague and I were exceptionally impressed with the quality of thought that was going into the work this group was providing to a very poor, multi-ethnic island community.
I came away thinking: “This is the way it is supposed to be!” They truly have a culturally-based approach to forming relationships with families, driven by the intense commitment that comes from living in the same community with their clients. When clients come in they are invited to sit down and “talk story” before any paper work is even considered. They are people first, clients second, and never a number. We came away feeling honored to have spent the day with this organization.
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