David La Piana

Last week, I was slated to fly to New York for a series of client meetings.  Alas, the great Snowageddon of 2010 arrived first and all flights were canceled. Thankfully, and very uncharacteristically, United sent the cancellation email, a day ahead of time. Unprecedented prescience, I say. My daughter Marisa, is at college in Philadelphia, texted pictures of kids using dining hall trays as makeshift sleds, while school was canceled for two blessed days. My client and I rescheduled, and my wife Mary and I headed to Tahoe for a different type of snow experience, and a welcome one. Sometimes Mother Nature calls the shots and all we can do is follow her orders.

The recent blizzards hitting the Eastern parts of our country led to shutdowns of federal operations in and around DC, Baltimore, and other major government centers. Thousands of federal employees were told to stay at home. Hooray, snow day! But wait a minute. Most of these folks, I would bet, have a computer, Internet connection, and telephone in their house. The government should realize natural and other disasters will from time to time make commuting to the megalith office blocks of the bureaucracy impossible, but why can’t most government workers just telecommute?

There are two principal reasons for this obvious solution not being embraced and implemented. The first is culture. An office-based culture finds it hard to define work as anything that can happen outside the four walls of the building. Work is both a job and a place. But large corporations and nonprofits of all sizes have long embraced this cultural change, enabling people to work from home or the road. The government can do it too.

The second reason is technology. Many government departments have old computer systems and high security concerns, which makes logging in remotely difficult, if not impossible. It is time for those system to be upgraded, allowing our public servants to do their work, without necessarily commuting, and even during a blizzard.

Does your organization have a “snowmaggedon” plan that the Feds could learn from?  How would your organization continue to provide vital services in the face of a commuting disaster?

Times are tough, and especially so for the executive directors or our nation’s nonprofits. Budget woes, increasing demands for both more services and more measurable outcomes, and the ever-greater difficulty of fundraising make what has always been a difficult job so much harder today. That is why I have a suggestion for every nonprofit CEO in America: get yourself a dog. Whether it is a big, romping, home-wrecker of a lab or golden retriever, an ever-watchful and protective German Shepherd, or one of a wide variety of teeny, tiny little miniature dogs, “purse dogs” they are often called, a well-selected, well-matched, well-trained dog will do several things for you.

First, no matter how miserable or long your day, when you come home your dog will make you feel like you just won the Nobel Prize. You just can’t beat a dog’s perennial happy-to-see-you attitude. It is a lot more predictable than that of your family members, especially if your family includes teenagers.

Second, no matter how tired you are, you will have to go for a walk. A small dog may only require a five minute stroll, but a big, energetic playmate says “grab the ball, dude, we’re going to the park!” So you’ll get some exercise – every day, rain or shine, layoffs or budget battles.

Third, there are few problems you will face that can’t be made better by having your dog under your desk while you face them. At La Piana Consulting every day is take a dog to work day. In fact, when Cody was a puppy, he would snooze on my lap while I wrote emails. Then he started snoozing at my feet, which was great except for the time he ate one of my shoelaces right off of my shoe. But that puppy time passes, and now he either lays at my feet while I work, reminding me every few hours that we both need a ball-throwing break, or he sits in my reading chair with me, head on my lap, reminding me that the world could be so much worse off without a dog.

The stock market finished 2009 up for the year, way up. Unemployment showed signs of moderating if not yet improving, if 10% can be called “moderate.” Yet the sources most commonly found in nonprofit budgets – state and local government, individual donors, and foundations, are all still pinched.

In fact from Hawaii to California to New York, and even small Nevada, state budgets are more than pinched, they are strangled. In Hawaii the state’s schools are closing 3 days a month. California’s UC system  is furloughing everyone from professors to janitors. In fact Berkeley normally hires around 60 new professors a year; this year it is 10.

The bottom line is the recession is over but that makes no difference to the 11 million people who have lost their jobs. Many of them are relying increasingly on nonprofits, especially after their unemployment runs out.  My new year’s predictions are almost too grim to recount: more nonprofits failing, more layoffs and service cuts, continued self-serving conservatism by most foundations, when now is the time to increase their payouts, as a few brave leaders have done.  So, 2010 will be another tough year for nonprofits, perhaps worse than last.

Between budgets, board meetings and the next big fundraiser, most nonprofit leaders have little time to contemplate larger questions. When they do find a minute, the topic is usually the organization’s mission – the good it is trying to achieve. But, is there ever time to consider the philosophical underpinnings of our work? I think this is actually quite important. We devote our lives to important causes, often fighting difficult, even losing, battles, because we believe we are on the right side, the moral side of the issue. But why?

Philosophers, going back many centuries, have tried to define morality, to distinguish good from evil, and to describe our role in the moral sphere. Immanuel Kant, in the 19^th century, wrote a Groundwork for a Metaphysic of Morals, a work I encountered in an introductory philosophy course a long time ago. Kant’s central argument has always stuck with me. Once a person knows what is right, Kant declares, he or she is under a moral imperative to do it. If you are unclear in your heart where the correct course lies, obviously you can’t act. But, after reflection, if you feel confident in your knowledge – this course is morally correct – then you are bound by morality to pursue it.

This is in a way the (unacknowledged) moral basis of the nonprofit sector. Many people go through life without really considering larger social questions of right and wrong, justice and equity.  Those who do, often arrive at the same conclusions: about basic human rights, group responsibility for individual needs, our duty to the planet and to succeeding generations, and similar weighty concerns. People who think deeply about these issues, those who are clear about what is right, often work in the nonprofit sector. Since they know what is right, they feel they must pursue it.  In this sector, we are all Kantians.

A stunning front page article in the Sunday November 29 New York Times reports that 1 in 8 Americans, and 1 in 4 children, now receive food stamps.

In California only 50% of those eligible are receiving the help, while in Missouri, it is 98%. This last statistic reminded me of one of my early organizing jobs, where I built a network of social service agencies in a two-county region to help eligible people learn of their right to food stamps. We helped hundreds of families build a better nutritional basis for their kids. Then, in 1981, in the aftermath of Proposition 13, the state legislature eliminated California’s Food Stamp Outreach Program.

Now, nearly thirty years later, tens of thousands of eligible children and their parents are going hungry, simply because they don’t know how to access the program.

My colleague Jo DeBolt and I recently completed a two-day training program for the national YMCA’s Resource Directors. At one point one of the Directors got up and reported that she had searched the Bible for references to planning.

Here are some of the best she found:

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Proverbs 29:18

“What a shame – yes, how stupid! – to decide before knowing the facts.” Proverbs 18:13

Here is one every capital campaign consultants could use:

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’” Luke 14:28-30

And my favorite:

“A wise man thinks ahead; a fool doesn’t, and he even brags about it!” Proverbs 12:16

May Pagsinohin is the Executive Director of the Philippine Science Centrum, the only informal science learning center in the Philippines. She is also a participant in a Noyce Leadership Institute development program for which I am faculty.

A few weeks ago May’s center was inundated with ten feet of water in the first of four typhoons to hit her country in rapid succession. May was not present at the time but 250 school children were. Her staff bravely escorted the kids out of the building and onto buses before the flood arrived, but not in time for the staff themselves to escape. Several staff, wet, cold and hungry, were trapped in the building for 15 hours before rescue workers got to them. Fortunately, they all survived.

The center, built of concrete block, also survived, but was full of mud. The science exhibits were all destroyed. Since that day May has worked tirelessly to restore her center, support her staff, and return things as much to as possible to normal. And she lives up to her commitments.

May made it to our recent leadership program meeting in Texas, where she was hailed for her bravery by her fellow leaders. We all wish her the best as she returns home, with hopes that she continues to weather any future storms.

I recently conducted a workshop on better boards at the annual meeting of the Association for Science and Technology Centers, held in Ft. Worth, Texas. It was Halloween so I brought a bag of candy, which went over well given the afternoon time slot.

What struck me most about the group was the number of new science centers either planning or actually opening up. Several new centers have launched, including a beautiful one right in Ft. Worth. So many more centers are planned you would hardly think there was a recession. My guess is that most of these centers were planned years ago and the fundraising was completed before the downturn. Those just in the planning stages now may have a harder time becoming a reality for a few years.

This started me thinking about the challenges of completing a major capital project in a down market. Sure the capital funds may be in hand, but is there the business to fund operations? Time will tell.

While traveling in Texas recently, I ran into Peter Friess of the Tech Museum of Innovation. I originally met Peter when he participated as a Fellow in Cohort 1 of the Noyce Leadership Institute, an international, year-long, leadership development program for science center CEOs, for which I serve as core faculty.

More recently, we also interviewed Peter as part of our NonprofitNext research initiative, and profiled the Tech Museum in the new Convergence report.

Peter was in Fort Worth to attend a reunion of his Noyce cohort in conjunction with the annual Association of Science and Technology Centers conference. I was in Fort Worth working with Cohort 2, and to do a workshop on governance at the same conference.

Simply put, Peter is brilliant. Originally trained in Germany as a watchmaker, he went on to earn a doctorate in science education and to lead the Deutsches Museum in Bonn as well as to work at the Getty and the Smithsonian. But I’m writing this post because I wanted to share his latest venture with you.

He calls it “Gallery Without Labels.” At each exhibit/experiment in the museum, instead of a placard explaining the thing, there is a video monitor. You choose the language you want and a child from that ethnic/language group comes on the monitor explaining how the exhibit works while he/she is actually doing it. This gets around language barriers and literacy levels. It makes everyone feel welcome. Apple is an underwriter. For added impact, in the lobby they have 30 video monitors with all the different kids doing their thing simultaneously. It models dynamic community engagement.

What better way to recruit the next generation of innovative museum goers than to show them leading the way?