David La Piana

I just read with horror a report that European authorities are moving to allow cell phone use on airplanes.

Can the U.S. be far behind?

While it would be nice once in a while to make a call from a plane, to let my family know I am late, or to confirm something with the office, that convenience is far outweighed by the necessity of listening to obnoxious and loud conversations for five hours.

On a recent flight, before the doors closed, I overheard a grandmother talking to her grandchild in alta voice: “No dear, Grandpa won’t be coming along, he is still in rehab.”

Then there was the young guy talking to his buddy – also full throttle: “You know how she is, she just kept coming on to me, asking why I wouldn’t let her…” you can fill in the rest.

The hassles of air travel are at least offset by the fact that, once airborne, there may be on food, no room, and little comfort, but at least it is peaceful. I never watch the movie. I work, read or sleep. But not with someone blaring on the phone from the next row.

And what are we to do? Can we turn and ask the person to keep it down? “I gotta right to talk on the phone, screw off!” is likely to be the answer.

Please FAA, let them text their little fingers to the bone, but keep the phones off!!!

The March 6 edition of The Chronicle of Philanthropy featured a series of articles about the upcoming generational shift in nonprofit leadership. I have been keenly interested in this topic for several years so I read it the articles closely.

One aspect of the shift was the issue of whether old timers (that would be my generation) are holding back younger leaders due to a concern that the less experienced 20- and 30-somethings are really too inexperienced to lead.

I read comments from both sides of the generation gap, then recalled my own experience.

 I first became an executive director at the tender age of 26. I had very little experience, having passed through several jobs in the past year due to Prop 13-caused budget cuts, no mentoring, and few relevant skills (two years earlier I had been in grad school studying literature). Still, no one questioned whether I could lead.

It occurred to me that perhaps this was because I am a boomer, and virtually all of the nonprofits in my community were being led by relatively young people. It was just assumed I would figure it out.

Now that we boomers are starting to retire, could it be that we still assume that only our generation knows how to lead?

The arrival of my new book, The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution, came just in time for a series of scheduled workshops in the Midwest.

In fact, the book arrived at the Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan about the same time I did.

Battle Creek is not easy to get to, especially the way I did it. I started in San Francisco, sat on the runway for 2 hours, then missed my connection from Chicago to Kalamazoo. Luckily United rebooked me on the last American flight out and I arrived in Kalamazoo late at night, then I got a ride for the last half hour of the trip into town.

The reception in Battle Creek was warm and enthusiastic, with a capacity group of local nonprofit leaders and consultants. I had a panel discussion in which three local leaders described their own experiences with strategy and planning, and overall it was a success.

On to Detroit, then Minneapolis.

I am eagerly awaiting the appearance of my newest book, The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution: Real-Time Strategic Planning in a Rapid-Response World.

It is due out in time for this year’s Grantmakers for Effective Organizations’ conference, which will be held in San Francisco beginning March 10. Vance Yoshida and I are giving a workshop for funders on this new approach to strategic planning.

After four years of research and testing, and a year of writing, RTSP is ready for prime time. We need funders to get behind us though, since they often require traditional strategic plans form their grantees. If a few forward-looking funders can support the new approach, we may be able to begin to break the lock the old approach has on strategy, and the nonprofit sector will be freed from its deadening effects.

For information of the new book – contact the publisher, Fieldstone Alliance (formerly the Wilder Publishing Center), using this link.

My last post was about innovation, but the question arises, Do nonprofit need to worry about innovation? Corporations are in very competitive worlds where their customers will go elsewhere if they don’t provide the best, newest, or otherwise shiniest products and services.

But nonprofits?

In Play to Win (Jossey Bass, 2005) I argued that nonprofits also face economic imperatives from competition. But there is another reason for a commitment to constant innovation in most areas of nonprofit endeavor, and that is, quite simply, that what we’re doing now is not solving the problem.

There are always better ways to address social ills, which nonprofits are on the forefront of providing partial solutions for. So who better, indeed who else, is going to devote informed effort to finding better solutions?

No environmental group thinks it is solving global climate change and no homeless shelter thinks it is ending homelessness, so there is always room for new ideas. Innovation brought us the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the delivery of food to the poor through Food Stamps, and a thousand other social goods.

So yes, your nonprofit needs to innovate, in order to compete, but also in order to succeed.

In their new book, The Future of Management, (Harvard Business School Press, 2007) authors Gary Hamel and Bill Breen ask "What problem was management invented to solve, anyway?"

It’s a terrific question for managers of nonprofits to ask themselves as well.

They go back to the origins of modern management, as far back as Frederick Taylor and the 1890′s, and report, to little surprise, that management was invented to solve a very specific problem, “how to do things with perfect replicability, at ever-increasing scale and steadily increasing efficiency…”

With this origin, it is no wonder that modern management tools fall so far short of successfully addressing 21st century problems such as how to innovate faster, make use of rapidly evolving technology, recruit and retain top talent, and motivate a work force to give its best.

Sure, a steady parade of books and gurus advises us to make the organization more innovative, the workplace more people-friendly, and to engage in creative problem-solving.

But Hamel and Breen go further. They see the modern corporation, increasingly populated by "Fickle Gen Y" employees (currently under age 28) who will bolt to a competitor if they are the least bit unfulfilled, and facing increasing competition from all sides, as needing to re-think the essential purpose of management.

Is it to control or to unleash; to replicate the same tasks or to find the right ones for the future; to lead or to follow?

Good questions!