David La Piana

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Marshall Ganz, a former United Farm Workers lead organizer who is now a lecturer at the Hauser Center on Nonprofits at Harvard. Marshall is a passionate champion of grassroots activism.

He sees the grassroots not as cover for what the professional staff in your organization wants to do, but as the very basis of a movement’s work. We talked about the difficulties of mass social movements keeping their broad character and the relentless drive toward funding and staffing that is necessary to success, but can undermine the basis of that success.

Talking to Marshall reminded me of my days as a community organizer through VISTA. I was trained in direct action organizing using the Saul Alinsky method. One gem from those days that has always stayed with me is this: “Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an organizing effort is for someone to give it money.”

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting Hana, on the rainy, green slopes of Maui. I was there to visit Ray Henderson, executive director of a drug treatment program serving this small community of 800 residents, many of whom are native Hawaiian. Ray participates in our current class of the PONO program, a leadership development program for ED’s in Hawaii.

Hana is remote—about a 3 hour drive on a windy, narrow, coastal road with more than 600 turns and more than 50 one-at-a-time bridges. Tourists complain about the drive, but they have no idea how bad this road used to be. My first trip to Hana was in 1978, and at that time the road was unpaved and strangely free of guardrails, despite cliff drop-offs of nosebleed proportions.

Since it is such a treat to visit, Mary came with me for a short no-kids vacation. The first person we met in Hana was Moni, who greeted us at the Hana Hotel. When I told him I was here to visit Ray, he sparkled, “He’s my cousin.”

Over the next 4 days I mentioned Ray’s name to many local people. “He’s my cousin” rivaled with “He’s my neighbor.” Everyone knew him. In fact, in this close-knit community, everyone knows everyone. The nonprofit community consists of a health clinic and a half-dozen human service organizations. The directors of these groups sit on one another’s boards, and in Ray’s case, his wife is co-director of the senior center.

The major problem in Hana seems to be the cost of living. People live in substandard housing, or crammed into a too-small house. Hawaii is notoriously expensive, and Hana is no exception. Local people may own land, but cannot afford to develop it. Most work for the hotel, the cattle ranch, or as fishermen. Subsistence living is an important part of the local economy.

For Hana to survive long-term, truly affordable housing needs to be developed. It is a special place worth keeping. As the local bumper sticker proclaims with pride: Thank God for Hana.

Recently I went into my neighborhood Cingular Wireless store to buy a new phone charger, a $20 item. Cody, still teething at 6 months, had eaten through the last one. I was struck by something that I have been noticing again and again ever since.

I asked the clerk for the charger, and within thirty seconds she had produced it. Very efficient. Then, she proceeded to spend nearly five minutes entering various bits of information into her computer system. She scanned the product code, then entered so much additional prose that I thought she had begun a novel. Next she turned to me, but ignored the twenty in my outstretched hand.

“What is your name?” she asked politely enough. “I don’t want to get on the mailing list, thanks,” I responded, indicating the cash in my hand.”I need your name to complete the transaction.” Ok, I told it to her.

“Zip code?” “Why do you need my zip code to sell me a phone charger?”

Well, you can see where this went. Apparently, in many retail stores the computer system requires both extensive inventory control information and customer personal information before it will spit out a receipt. So much for customer service! It feels, as a consumer, like quite an imposition to stand around solely in order to feed the system with information.

Remember the old days? You walked in, paid in cash, and were out in a few seconds. I am not fond of shopping to begin with, but this slavery to corporate database needs really drives me nuts.

Last week I spent three days facilitating a Sierra Club summit on global climate change in which 100 of the Club’s top leaders and thinkers struggled with the impending catastrophe and what to do about it.

At that meeting I was stunned by the enormity of the challenge ahead. So, you can imagine my excitement when I read in the papers that the structure of the largest leveraged buy-out in history — valued at $45B — is being driven in part by environmental concerns. The buyers, and their bankers at Goldman Sachs, are insisting on a greener company before they buy TXU, the Texas-based utility that is the subject of this deal. Eight planned new coal plants will be scrapped, and hundreds of millions will be spent on research into alternative energy.

The key to the deal, of course, was the intervention of Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which negotiated the concessions in exchange for not opposing the sale.

At least two lessons can be learned from this event:
• First, if you can make enough trouble for a corporation, they will want you as a friend.
• Second, and more important, is the long-term value of getting corporate leaders to serve on nonprofit boards. Two of the leveraged buy-out leaders are past and current board members of World Wildlife Fund. I have to believe that the experience of serving on that board made them more sensitive to the environmental issues involved in this deal and also gave them a friendly back door through which they could approach ED and NRDC.

All in all it was a good day for the planet.

A recent Board Café article (CompassPoint; 1/19/07) reported the findings of a reader survey about boards. Only 13% of respondents, 80% of whom are mostly board members themselves, thought that boards do a good job at fundraising. If you asked executive directors, even that anemic 13% might be too high.

So, what’s up? Why can’t boards raise money?

In my long and sometimes painful experience with this question, I have seen the following reasons:

1) Board members were recruited with no expectation to raise money, then had it dumped on them later — the classic bait-and-switch. Candidates are often told — by other board members – that fundraising is not an expectation.

2) Board members are not trained in how to raise money, just exhorted to go out and do it. As one client said, “What to they want me to do, go out and rob a bank?”

3) There is tension between having a constituent board and a board with access to money. Many nonprofits want it both ways — a board of the people, and a board that can raise serious cash. That is a tough combination in most circumstances.

4) Staff don’t know how to develop the board, so they just get frustrated and nag. Staff’s board development and management skills may be lacking. They pay little attention to the board, but lament its inability to raise money.

5) People who raise and give substantial sums want to have a voice in running the organization. If they are shut out of appropriate board governance then they will not be very motivated to fundraise. The executive director must engage the board deeply for it to raise money.

As 2006 crawled to a sad ending, we had two new low points to mark.

The first was the 3,000th dead American in Iraq. Traditionally, there are 10 wounded soldiers for every 1 killed in combat, but with improvements in body armor, the ratio may now be 20 to 1. So, add another 30,000 to 60,000 wounded Americans to the toll. And, don’t forget the more than 100,000 Iraqis killed in combat and uncountable numbers killed or injured during the occupation and civil war.

The second is the execution of Saddam Hussein. Even as Americans work through our many human rights organizations to end the death penalty at home, we see it applied by our friends in Iraq. If anyone ever deserved to die for his crimes it is indeed Saddam. But, somehow the specter of a government having gained complete control over a person through imprisonment then deciding to kill him turns my stomach.

I recently re-read Chapter 6 of Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting Fieldbook, a companion to his Flawless Consulting, the bible of the consulting industry. At the outset of this chapter he makes a remarkable claim: “The way to change a culture is to change the conversations.”

This statement strikes me as both true and profound. How many times do we, as consultants, try to help a client change a clearly dysfunctional pattern—even one the client admits is problematic—only to find the conversation drifts back to familiar ground? We try to refocus the conversation, but to no avail, and we all leave the meeting frustrated.

Block’s suggestion is to engage the group in a conversation about what matters to the members of the group—to view them as participants in the discussion, not as recipients of information.

When I have taken this approach, perhaps inadvertently or out of frustration, I have found that the conversation can indeed change. Since people make their own sense of their work life, asking them what matters to them and challenging them to go deeper than the usual complaints—to get personal, to take a risk—can be powerful. Of course, the conversation must be two-way, and so the consultant must go deeper with them.

The result can be the beginning of a more lasting change in the conversation and, subsequently, in the group’s views of their work and organizational life together.

We are in the midst of a generational shift as baby boomer nonprofit leaders retire and younger folks takeover. Everyone is talking about the need for good nonprofit leaders.   And lots of them!

So what makes someone a good nonprofit leader?

Certainly, given the “accidental executive director” phenomenon that leads so many of us to fall into ED jobs, we cannot say great leadership is a result of our lifelong aspiration to lead a nonprofit. Similarly, given our varied backgrounds—we have all known lawyers, social workers, immigrant community leaders, history majors, and plain old college drop outs who have successfully led nonprofits—we cannot say it is our specific preparation or career path.

What about personality style? We have, in our workshops and seminars, administered the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to dozens of nonprofit leaders, and I can tell you that there is no “type” that nonprofit leaders cluster in. We are extreme introverts and extreme extroverts, thinkers and feelers, doers and procrastinators.

So what is it?

Passion for the mission? Yes! But plenty of passionate people still fail (often passionately).

A very practical approach to management? Yes, as well! It is a very practical job: the budget numbers must add up, the services must really meet people’s needs, and the staff must work as a team.

So, yes, a combination of passion for the work and a practical management sense are essential. But I think there is at least one other key ingredient. This is what Jim Collins refers to in Good to Great as the ability to look the brutal facts of your organization’s existence in the eye. The successful nonprofit leader will face no fewer crises, competitors, fickle funders, and other dismal circumstances than anyone else. But it may be that s/he sees these challenges more clearly than less successful leaders. Ignorance is bliss—only until your payroll bounces.

Successful nonprofit leaders always seem to be thinking about the next hurdle, the next big challenge they will encounter. They hate surprises so they insist on good data from their systems, whether it’s an entire finance department or Quickbooks running on their own laptop.

They try to anticipate the next bad thing. Significantly, they do not ignore or dismiss their own failures, nor do they beat themselves up over them. They acknowledge and then learn from them.

But, successful nonprofit leaders are also optimists. Jim Collins says that good leaders, after looking at the brutal facts, are optimistic that they will overcome whatever obstacles are placed in front of them.

So, let’s put it all together: We are looking for a generation of leaders in their 20′s, 30′s, and 40′s who are passionate about their organizations’ missions and optimistic about their organizations’ chances for success; who approach management as a practical undertaking, full of understandable and essential tasks; and who never flinch from looking straight bad news straight in the eye, knowing they can handle it.

Know anyone who fits that description?