David La Piana

Lately I have been reading up on the factors that build resilience, both in individuals and in organizations. Pulling from several sources, both organizational and psychological, here are the top “secrets” of long-term success, in both personal and organizational life:

Be realistic, not overly optimistic. Optimists have a harder time coping with setbacks. Realists expect them. Nonprofit leaders have to be ready to guide the organization through anything.

Build strong social supports. People need to lean on one another in hard times. Nonprofit success depends on the support and mutual goodwill of colleagues.

Have faith in God or in yourself. You have to believe in something, either external or internal to yourself. Self-confidence is essential to leaders, it inspires others to believe.

Be creative and cultivate the ability to improvise on the spot. Life is unpredictable.  Seldom does anything in a nonprofit follow an expected trajectory.

Focus on the larger picture, don’t get lost in the weeds. For leaders, the details are not as important as the vision of where you are going and why. Find someone else who can take care of the small picture and dream big.

Help others to focus on the needs of others, Model and spread altruism. Nonprofit leaders need to demonstrate care for their employees. Offer them the best salaries and benefits, and the most congenial workplace, you can afford.

Practice gratitude. Remember how lucky you are, and thank others for their help.  An organization is a collection of individuals acting in concert. While the leader gets all the glory (or blame) s/he should continually recognize those who make success possible.

For a limited time, my article The Nonprofit Paradox recently published in the  Stanford Social Innovation Review is available online for free regardless of subscription.

Why are nonprofit organizations so often plagued by the very ills they aim to cure?  Read the article online, or download a PDF, and let us know what you think.

On June 30, Northern California Grantmakers and the Foundation Center, sponsored an engaging panel discussion in San Francisco, about Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector.

Each panelist highlighted different aspects of the five trends impacting the social sector and what their organizations are doing in response to, or in some cases, as part of the trends.

For example, Matt Halperin said the Omidyar Network is sector-agnostic when it comes to their investments, for them, sector-blurring has become sector indifference.

Dee Dee Nguyen of Marin Community Foundation talked about the changing demographics of California and the challenge of engaging younger donors in giving circles.

Peter Friess of the Tech Museum of Innovation showed a footage of kids being videotaped, so that the childrens’ explanations can be used in place of signage explaining the museum’s exhibits, to make the visitor experience more meaningful for other children.

It was a lively discussion with lots of people hanging around after for more.  Special thanks to Judi Powell and Dion Ward of NCG and Janet Camarena of Foundation Center for helping make this event a success!

Bill Coy, Mary Stelletello, and I are on our way to Honolulu for the capstone graduation event with our 7th class of PONO fellows. PONO is both a Hawaiian word meaning “righteousness” and an acronym: Promoting Outstanding Nonprofit Organizations. PONO is built on our firm’s Leadership Advanced program and provides a yearlong leadership development experience for up to 15 Hawaii nonprofit executive directors.

With our PONO partner, the Hawaii Community Foundation, this fall we will launch the Hawaii Emerging Leaders Program (HELP), which will adapt our proven leadership curriculum for non-CEO leaders in nonprofits in Hawaii. These are program directors, CFOs, development directors and other senior leaders who usually report to the executive director, and who may one day be executive directors themselves.

Looking towards the nonprofit sector’s next generation of emerging leaders, be sure to check out one of Rosetta Thurman’s latest blog posts, “11 Reasons Why New College Grads Should Pursue Nonprofit Careers” and Brent Copen’s recent post about the May 2010 HBR article “The Leaders We Need Now” at  our NonprofitNext blog.

I returned recently to Stanford Law School to give a guest lecture on nonprofit strategy to a class on social entrepreneurship taught by Suzanne McKechnie Klar. Suzanne founded Build, an amazing organization that provides real-world entrepreneurial experience for at-risk youth.  It was inspiring to meet a group of our most promising future lawyers and to learn how deeply they care about social justice. We had quite a lively discussion that reinforced the thoughtfulness of smart young people and the positive impact they are going to have on the world.

I just led a teleconference today, sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Nonprofits, on the topic of the future of the nonprofit sector. I focused on our recent research initiative NonprofitNext and related report Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector.  I invite everyone, CEN members and beyond, to join the conversation and visit the NonprofitNext blog.

Boarding a plane at Washington Dulles we were held aside while 50 WWII veterans, filed past to board first. Even in high-pressure D.C. no one complained. In fact I, like others, felt honored to stand aside and offer a kind of friendly honor guard as they boarded.

As their line slowly passed mine I talked to several guys. One remarkably spry fellow told me he was 94, and that the man behind him was his baby brother. The younger man, only 85, told me there were four brothers, all of whom had gone to war – and come back alive. I thought of their mother and father, long dead now, and the years of agony they must have experienced with all four of their sons in a war.  I heard there were two Pearl Harbor survivors in the group but never met them. I did however talk to a man who proudly announced that he was the youngest of the whole bunch, at only 81. I quickly did the math and said “Wait a minute, you must have been a kid!” “Yep,” he answered, “I enlisted at 16.”

A woman in line behind me googled “World War II veterans Washington DC” on her cell phone and relayed to us that a nonprofit had been formed in recent years, called Honor Flight Network, to bring groups of veterans to DC to see the WWII Memorial on the National Mall.  The whole experience made me feel good. Good that these men are alive, and that after the horrors of the largest war in human history they had lived long and I hope peaceful lives. But I also felt good that the nonprofit sector had provided a vehicle for a group of volunteers to organize, raise funds, and give these men some small measure of the boundless thanks they deserve.

WNPFZKCUTNDR

I wholeheartedly support Barbara Kibbe’s recent suggestion to make the next GEO meeting in two years more interactive. I want to emphasize this: let’s make it radically more interactive.

I have been to dozens of conferences, including every GEO meeting since 1998. GEO is great because of the people, some of my favorite people in the field seem to attend. Still, and this is no knock on GEO, it is the sad state of conferences these days that, just as in the 1970′s, and probably back to the Pleistocene, they alternate between plenary sessions and panels, and “interactive” means a 10 minute Q&A at the end. We can do better.

Next time let’s do GEO as a three day Open Space session. We could invite people to consider some big topic in philanthropy, to just come at noon the first day and make it happen. There will be no conference planning committee. There will be no proposals for workshops. There will be no agenda. There will be no celebrity plenary speaker at lunch. There will be no break out rooms. We just need one room large enough to hold all of us with lots of space to move around. We need a bank of laptops we can all use to capture our “proceedings.” And we also need a flexible caterer who can provide food throughout the day so there are no meal breaks per se. People will be having too much fun to break for meals all at once.

Open Space begins with people self-organizing an agenda. Now, that sounds hard to do on the fly with a group of several hundred people, and it does take a different type of pre-planning, as well as a cracker jack support team on site, but in the end it always works. I have never facilitated, or participated in, a failed Open Space meeting. In my experience, Open Space meetings have been by far the most meaningful.  Given the right structure and support on site, people make it work.

The GEO crowd is a great, smart, creative group of people. Let’s give them the conference they deserve – a conference they make for themselves.

As I waded through nearly a foot of water at the curb while exiting a cab at SFO, rain pouring down my collar, all I could think is “What possessed me to book a 4PM Sunday flight to Pittsburgh?” But I knew the answer. It was for a good cause, of course, the biennial meeting of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, where my colleague Heather Gowdy and I will be leading a session on our latest research initiative NonprofitNext.

GEO’s conference is my favorite gathering because it is a group of people who understand the importance of building strong, sound organizations, not just funding exciting new programs. Still, going out in this curiously wild April storm seemed a bit crazy. So I was all the more surprised when I was joined at the gate by roughly a dozen Bay Area foundation folks, all waiting for the same flight.

GEO is an important part of the nonprofit sector. I must be one of a very small number of people who have attended every one of its meetings, going back, if memory serves, to 1998. The first gathering of a few dozen people in Monterey has mushroomed into an international conference with several hundred foundation leaders and capacity builders.

Despite the dramatic loss of funding for organizational effectiveness issues over the past decade GEO has grown. It publishes important resources, including our Due Diligence Tool, and in addition to the biennial gathering, convenes smaller specialized meetings on many topics. GEO enriches the sector, even if getting to the conference requires traveling through rain, sleet, or snow, it’s always worth it.

Following up my recent Merging Wisely article in Stanford Social Innovation Review, I will be discussing the practical issues involved in merging nonprofit organizations at the next SSIR Live! webinar. From Nonprofit Partnerships to Mergers: How to Restructure for Success will take place Tuesday, April 6, 2010, from 11:00am – Noon PT. I plan to leave plenty of time for questions, so bring yours and join us. Register today!