David La Piana

I pass through the United terminal at SFO pretty regularly. As I walk quickly toward the gates, I pass a changing art display area. It’s an interesting way to view art—drive-by connoisseurship.

The displays are quite varied. I have seen collections of miniature skyscrapers, percussion instruments, Mexican tiles, and dinosaurs.

But, the current display has me baffled. It’s a collection of disparate objects ranging from a giant pirate’s head to an old painting of a sailing ship to a set of enormous shark jaws (with teeth), to some crabs worthy of Fisherman’s Wharf.

Of course, it could just be that, at the speed I am passing, I have just completely missed the point of this exhibit.

Has anyone seen this exhibit? If so, can you tell me what’s the theme?

Like the weather, everyone seems to be talking about nonprofit leadership these days; but, unlike the weather, they actually seem to be trying to do something about it as well.

Foundations are launching leadership initiatives that usually involve training or mentoring opportunities for nonprofit executives; some are even creating leadership programs within their foundation’s funding guidelines. Others are commissioning studies that issue dire predictions about the future of the sector, as experienced nonprofit leaders flee.

All of this concern, and most of the resulting activity, is well-founded.

As I discovered during my sixteen-year stint as a nonprofit executive director, it’s a tough job!

I am also quite hopeful about the future of leadership in our sector. First of all, the emergence of a discussion of leadership is bringing greater recognition of the fact that we often ask our nonprofit leaders to do the near-impossible. If that recognition translates into support for higher spending on infrastructure, and perhaps even into more unrestricted grant funds, it will help.

I am also optimistic because, unlike the leaders of my generation, today’s nonprofit leaders are more likely to seek formal management training.

I want to suggest a wonderful read to anyone interested in the topic of leadership. A book we use in our own leadership development work with executive directors. The Leadership Challenge, by Kouzes and Posner, offers an affirming approach with lots of practical suggestions for better leadership. This is important because, in the end, leadership is not about being a leader, it is about leading. It is a quintessentially practical activity. So give the book a look, and then go out and lead!

The other day I watched the news, dumbfounded, as video showed a mentally disabled older woman let out of a taxi on Skid Row in Los Angeles.

Fortunately, a worker from one of the rescue missions in the area, in the highest traditions of nonprofit service, saw the woman on a security camera tape. She ran out to the street to help the woman, who was walking, oblivious, through speeding traffic, dressed only in a hospital gown and slippers.

When interviewed, the woman had no idea where she was or how she got there, but remembered being in a hospital. The news report uncovered that the woman had been discharged from a hospital, and apparently put into a cab, whose driver was told to take her to Skid Row.

I worked in the mental health system before getting into consulting, and from what I recall, a taxi ride to Skid Row does not qualify as discharge planning. Even more shocking was the report that this is not an isolated incident. We have all heard of “Greyhound Therapy,” where a local sheriff puts a troublesome mentally ill person on a bus to a sunny state far away, but this “taxi therapy” is even worse.

There is perhaps one positive note in all of this. If huge hospital corporations are putting unstable, incoherent, helpless people on the street in Skid Row, maybe it is because they know that is where the nonprofits that can help them are located. But wouldn’t it be better to contract with the nonprofits for that help, and arrange for an orderly transfer, rather than just dumping people on the street where they can be killed by a speeding car or victimized by others?

My hat is off to all the workers in those rescue missions in Skid Row, and especially to the woman seen running out to save the victim of a large system’s disregard.

I heard a wonderfully useful phrase the other day from Jerry Sternin: “TBU.”

It stands for “True, but Useless.”

For example, when you tell me that your nonprofit suffers from difficulty attracting staff due to the sector’s low salaries, I might answer “TBU!” Your complaint is undoubtedly true, but it is not particularly helpful.

If, on the other hand, you tell me that you have difficulty attracting staff because of a reputation in the community as a terrible place to work—now, that’s a fact we can do something about! We can figure out why you have such a reputation, and what can be done to change it.

It is True And Useful—TAU.

The week before last I had the opportunity to travel to Pueblo, in southern Colorado, to offer a workshop for about 100 nonprofit leaders, and later a keynote address at the local Nonprofit Day, for about 450 community leaders.

Pueblo was once the steel capital of the west but, as that industry moved out, a long period of decline set in. Nowadays, Pueblo is making a comeback. Right downtown is a beautiful performing arts center and children’s museum complex any town could be proud of; and it certainly did not hurt my enjoyment that the March weather was in the 70s, while it was cold and rainy back home.

Pueblo’s most famous philanthropist has to be David Packard, who was born there before moving to California to co-found that famous company in his garage. Having visited the town of his birth, I now have a better appreciation for Mr. Packard’s no-nonsense, down-to-earth, no-airs, approach to philanthropy. The town is blessed with plenty of people quietly working together to make a better life for all.

You may have heard the consultant’s expression: “You can have it good, cheap, and fast—choose any two.”

If not, it is an instructive little saying to remember. For example:

Good and Cheap, but not fast—We can do good quality work and keep the price down, if in return you are flexible as to when we deliver the product. This flexibility allows the consultant to build in work on other more urgent projects as needed.

Good and Fast, but not cheap—We can do good quality work, and fast, but it is going to cost you a premium because meeting your urgency means we have to say “no,” or “not now” to someone else’s project.

Cheap and Fast, but not good—A consultant can do the work quickly, and not charge very much, and this may be quite attractive to a client with urgent needs and limited resources. But beware: The work you get may not be of very high quality, so that the time and money you do spend may be largely wasted.

Perhaps the most interesting presentation at the recent GEO meeting (see previous entry) was given by Jerry Sternin, a professor at Tufts and evangelist for a concept he calls “positive deviance” (PD).

Simply put, in any situation where most of the people have a bad outcome (war, famine, malnutrition, etc.) there are usually a few individuals who manage to remain resilient, to beat the odds. Jerry dubs these people positive deviants, meaning they have deviated from the expected norm in a positive way. His ideas are articulated succinctly in an article he wrote for Harvard Business Review in May 2005: “Your Company’s Secret Change Agents.“

What I find compelling about Sternin’s description of the PD phenomenon is its universal applicability. He used it first to develop a model for combating malnutrition in Vietnam, with such success that it is now used by the UN in 41 nations.

But it also applies to organizational life. Here is an example I have made up from a fictional nonprofit:

Suppose a nonprofit has ten separate programs, eight of which are losing money while two others are generating surpluses. Suppose further that the opportunities for different revenue streams are about the same for each of the ten programs (they all offer the same service—for example, child care).

The PD approach would engage program staff themselves in first studying intensely the more successful programs’ practices, and then presenting their findings to the entire group of program staffs. The PD model predicts that, over time, the less financially solvent programs would voluntarily adopt the financially healthier programs’ practices, closing the performance gap—all without any edicts from management.

I like it, and I am already thinking of ways this concept could be of use to our clients.

I just returned from the biannual meeting of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, known affectionately as GEO, held this year in Atlanta. Since its founding ten years ago, GEO has held five such national gatherings — funders who care deeply not just about the programmatic work they support, but also about the strength of the organizations within which nonprofits carry out their work.

At a plenary session on the last day, Barbara Kibbe, one of the founders of both GEO and the field of nonprofit organizational effectiveness, asked the room if anyone other than herself had managed to attend all five GEO meetings over the past decade. Only one person among the hundreds present raised their hand — me!

I probably spend more time than the average person sitting in nonprofit board meetings. It’s a consultant’s occupational hazard.

If you’re a consultant like me you attend a lot of client board meetings–either to be interviewed prior to getting a project, to engage the board in a discussion related to a project, to provide a training on some aspect of governance, or perhaps to present a report upon completion of a project.

You may also sit on one or two boards yourself, where you spend much of your time biting your overly-opinionated tongue and trying to remember that no one appointed you to ensure the tasks of moving the discussion along, shortening the committee reports, focusing on strategy rather than the minutiae of operations, or ending on time.

I’m not complaining, I actually find board meetings fascinating. I find myself playing the game of “Figure Out The Board.” This is especially fun if you are attending a particular organization’s board meeting for the first time. Is the chair chairing or is the executive? Who is driving the agenda? Is there an agenda? Is anyone taking minutes? Are they recording the meeting so some already overworked administrative staff person can later transcribe every scintillating word of the discussion? Is there a focus to the meeting, a big issue?

You get the idea.

In the end, a board is simply a group of people trying to do what’s right. They may have forgotten that fact in the heat of the moment, and often they have no idea what is truly right, or best, in a given difficult situation, but they are trying. And our work, as consultants, is to give them the tools to do it better. The tools and the encouragement.

Gotta go. . . there is a board meeting I have to get to!

On smaller projects a single consultant can negotiate the contract and scope of work with the client, design the work plan, and often carry out all the required tasks from information gathering to analysis and from facilitating negotiations to drafting agreements and reports.

Larger, more complex projects require a team, either because the work entails specialized expertise which no one consultant may possess (financial analysis and board development, for example), or because there is simply too much work for one person to accomplish (interview 50 stakeholders, analyze the competition, and develop a business plan within a short period).

Team work among consultants adds its own level of complexity to the equation — coordinating work plan elements, timelines and personal styles, as well as juggling multiple demands from other projects, co-workers, and supervisors. Thus, team work skills are a key to success on larger projects.

Some larger firms use a strictly hierarchical approach to control work flow and keep sanity in complex engagements. A typical project for them might entail one day a week from a partner, two days from a manager and the full time efforts of two to three junior people.

This approach involves a great deal of leverage of the senior person’s time, spreading him or her across multiple clients, but allowing junior people to do the bulk of the work. It is a highly profitable way to approach the business of consulting. In this structure teamwork is less important than understanding your role and having the ability to follow directions.

In my firm we developed a different model, partly out of our value system, where collegiality is highly prized, and partly because we were not hampered by the existing processes of large firms or the inexorable drive toward ever-higher profits.

As a bunch of nonprofit people, we built a firm where 90% of the consultants are senior people, capable of leading a project. We know this is what our clients want and need, because this is what we wanted and needed when we led nonprofits. Our senior people work closely with our junior staff to develop their abilities as well as to share the work.

We have very little hierarchy. In fact, anyone, including me, might be assigned to work on a project where someone else, someone of nominally “lower” status, is the project leader. It seems to work.