Increasing Your Organization’s Effectiveness

Organizational Development (OD) has been a nonprofit sector buzzword for years. What does it really mean? Richard Beckhard originally defined Organizational Development as "a planned, top-down, organization-wide effort to increase the organization’s effectiveness and health" (Beckhard, R. 1969, p. 9, Organization Development Strategies and Models). We believe that successful OD begins with strategy.

Organizational Strategy is the means a nonprofit uses to determine how it will advance its mission, realize its vision, and deliver real value to the community or cause it serves, through successfully navigating competitive, collaborative, and other market dynamics.

Competitive Advantage

La Piana Consulting can enhance your organizational strategy by helping define your organization’s competitive advantage. Although many nonprofit practitioners shy away from competitive analysis, we have found it to be an extremely powerful concept as groups work to leverage the strengths that make them unique or set them apart from others. We can help you create an organizational strategy that consists of actions you will need to take to create and sustain that competitive advantage and, therefore, be more effective than ever in achieving your mission.

As described in the new book, The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution, the Strategy Pyramid represents strategy as the successful resolution of essential operational challenges as a necessary base upon which to build the organization. Programmatic decisions—determining how best to advance the mission—rest upon this successful base of operations. Organizational strategies that determine your nonprofit’s market position and success at acquiring resources rest on its initiatives at the top of the pyramid.

Once you have developed your organizational strategy, we can engage in insightful research that will help you make the best decisions about management and organizational structures – how to prepare for change, how to focus on your most impactful activities, how to create effective teams, and how to develop a culture that embraces change.