Notes from Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Principles and Practices by Peter Drucker → The Uber Mentor

These notes are just my skeleton of the book through level 7. When you see a downward pointing triangle without any detail below it, the missing content exists at level 8 or greater. These notes provide an X-ray and topic map. Amazon sells the complete work.

Preface

NPOs are central to American society and are indeed its most distinguishing feature

America’s largest employer

2-3% of GNP. Same as 40 years ago.

NPOs “product” is a changed human being

NPO

Cured patient

A child that learns

A young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult

A changed human life altogether

Business supplies goods and services

Has discharged its task when

the customer buys the product,

pays for it, and

is satisfied with it.

Government …

Has discharged its function when its policies are effective

Need management so they can concentrate on their mission

Work together on their…

mission

leadership

management

Need management because they do not have a conventional “bottom line”

Need to learn how to use management as their tool lest they be overwhelmed by it

There is a “management boom”

Little that is so far available to the NPO help them with their leadership and management has been specifically designed for them. Little of it pays any attention to the distinct characteristics of the NPO or to their specific central needs

Their mission

What are “results” in non-profit work

Strategies required to market their services and obtain the money they need to do their job

Challenge of introducing innovation and change in institutions that depend on volunteers and therefore cannot command

The specific human and organizational realities of NPO

The very different role that the board plays in the NPO

The need to attract volunteers, to develop them and to manage them for performances

Relationships with a diversity of constituencies

Fund-raising and fund development

The problem of individual burnout, which is so acute in NPOs precisely because the individual commitment to them tends to be so intense.

Need materials that are specifically developed out of their experience and focuses on their realities and concerns

Bob Buford of the Leadership Network

Get audio tapes. Leadership and Management in the Non-Profit Institutions (“The Non-Profit Drucker”) .

Train …

new staff people

new board members

volunteers

NPOs — America’s resounding success in the last 40 years

In many ways it is the “growth industry” of America

Health-care institutions

Examples…

American Heart Association

American Cancer Society

Leadership in …

research on major diseases

prevention and treatment

Community services

Such as …

Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.

Boy Scouts of the U.S.A.

World’s largest women’s and men’s organization

Fast growing pastoral churches

Hospital

Many other NPOs that have emerged as the center of effective social action in a rapidly changing and turbulent America

Has become America’s “Civil Society”

Face very big and different challenges

Convert donors into contributors

Need more money to do vital work

A national disgrace, indeed a real failure, that the affluent, well-educated young people give proportionately less that their so much poorer blue-collar parents used to give

If a sector is judged by its share of the GNP

Leisure — doubled

Medical care — gone up 5 times

Education (colleges/universities) — tripled

Share given by American people to the NP, human-change agents has not increased at all

Giving is necessary above all so that the NPOs can discharge the one mission they all have in common

To satisfy the need of the American people for…

Self-realization

Living out our ideals, our beliefs, our best opinion of ourselves

To make contributors out of donors means that the American people can see what they want to see—or should want to see—when each of us looks at himself or herself in the mirror in the morning:

Someone who as a citizen takes responsibility

Someone who as a neighbor cares

Give community and common purpose

People no longer have exposure to community

Live in big cities and their suburbs

NPOs are the American community

Ability to perform and to achieve

The mission comes first and your role as a leader

The commitment (of the NPO)

What we really believe in.

Introduction

NPO exists to bring about change in individuals and in society

What missions work and what missions don’t work

How to define the mission

The ultimate test of the mission is right action

The first job of the leader is to think through and define the mission of the institution

Setting concrete action goals

Workable examples

Give assurance to the afflicted

Help girls grow into proud, self-confident, and self-respecting young women

Making Jesus the head of this church and its chief executive officer

Make citizens out of the rejected

Making gentlemen out of savages

Be the informed and responsible buyer for the American family

Unworkable examples

Our mission is health care

Nobody can tell you what action or behavior follows.

Has to be operational, otherwise it’s just good intentions

Has to focus on what the institution really tries to do

And then do it so that everybody in the organization can say, This is my contribution to the goal.

Task of the NPO manager is to try to convert the organization’s mission statement into specifics.

The mission may be forever—or as long as we foresee

But the goal can be short-lived, or it might change drastically because a mission is accomplished

Common mistake is to make the mission statement into a kind of hero sandwich of good intentions.

It has to be simple and clear

As you add new tasks, you deemphasize and get rid of old ones

You can only do so many things

Have to think through

what are the very few things we can accomplish that will do the most for us to accomplish the mission entrusted to us, and

which are the things that

contribute either marginally or

are no longer of great significance

Constantly look at the state-of-the-art

Look at the opportunities in the community

Things that were of primary importance may become secondary or even totally irrelevant.

Watch this constantly

Three “musts” of a successful mission

Look at strength and performance

Do better what you already do well—if it’s the right thing to do.

Look outside at the opportunities, the needs

Where can we with our limited resources really make a difference, really set a new standard?

Limited resources

One sets the standard by doing something and doing it well. You create a new dimension of performance for the entire human race.

What do we really believe in (committed to)

Summary

Analysis

What are the opportunities, the needs?

Do they fit us?

Do we really believe in this?

Must reflect all three or it will fall down on what is its ultimate goal, its ultimate purpose and final test

It will not mobilize the human resources of the organization for getting the right things done.

Leadership is a foul-weather job

Crisis leadership

Depend on a leader when there is a crisis.

There will always be a crisis

The most important task of an organization’s leader is to anticipate crisis.

Perhaps not avert, but to anticipate

Make the organization capable of

Called innovation, constant renewal

Can build an organization that

The problems of success

Ruined more organizations than failure

Creates euphoria

Outrun your resources

Retire on the job

Have to grow with success

Make sure that one doesn’t become unable to adjust.

Growth slows down and the institution plateaus

Has to be able to maintain its … Otherwise, it becomes frozen.

Momentum

Flexibility

Vitality

Vision

Hard choices

Need the discipline of organized abandonment

No “bottom line.” Prone to consider everything they do to be righteous and moral and to serve a cause, so they are not willing to say, if it doesn’t produce results then maybe we should direct our resources elsewhere.

Need to face up to critical choices

Need to face up critical choices

Example: Catholic church in big metropolitan archdiocese trying to abandon their school system

That’s a value choice.

And it’s critical that it’s faced up to and not pushed under the rug, as we like to do

Innovation

Once you acknowledge that, you can innovate

Provided you organize yourself to look for innovation

Recognize that change is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

We know where to look for change. Here are a few examples

Unexpected success in your own organization

Population changes

Changes in mind-set and mentality

Don’t wait

Organize yourself for systematic innovation

Build the search for opportunities, inside and outside, into your organization.

Look for changes as indications of an opportunity for innovation

To build all this into your system,

you, as the leader of the organization, have to set the example.

How can we set up systems

to release energy

that will allow the proper innovative decisions

to be made

and implemented

and, at the same time, encourage the operation

to go on at the necessary level

while it is being changed?

Organize yourself to see the opportunity

If you don’t look out the window, you won’t see it

Go beyond your reporting system

Most reporting systems don’t reveal opportunities,

They report problems

They report the past

Most answer questions we have already asked

Whenever you need a change, ask: If this were an opportunity for us, what would it be?

Then to implement the innovation there are a few point you must be aware of

The most common mistake is to attempt to build too much reinsurance into the change, to cover your flank, not to alienate yesterday.

Examples (see page # 13)

It must be organized separately

Yet you have to make sure the existing operations don’t lose the excitement of the new entirely.

Otherwise, they become not only hostile but paralyzed.

The innovative strategy

Need an innovative strategy. A way to bring the new to the marketplace.

Successful innovation finds a target of opportunity.

Should you have part of your organization set up some kind of small task force committed to R&D or to marketing?

People who will do what the situation calls for (p15). This is effective crisis leadership.

Churchills may be very rare

But another group is, fortunately, quite common

People who can look at a situation and say:

College president who had to raise money

Rural electric cooperative

Everybody has power

So what do we do now?

How to pick a leader

Try to match the strengths of an individual with the needs of the institution

Look at what the individuals have done, what their strengths are. What the individuals have done with their strength.

You can only perform with strength

What is the one immediate key challenge of the institution?

Raising money

Rebuilding the morale of the organization

Redefining its mission

Bringing in new technology

Hospital example (see page # 16)

Look for integrity or character

Would I want one of my children to work under that person?

If he is successful, then the young people will imitate him

Would I want my son to look like this?

This I think is the ultimate question

Mediocrity in leadership shows up almost immediately.

Mediocrity in business & government can survive a lot longer

Has a number of bottom lines

No one determinant (like profit)

Deal with balance, synthesis, a combination of bottom lines for performance.

Multiplicity of constituencies

Each of which can say no and none of which can say yes

Reflected in your board

The leader must do exceptionally well, because your agency is committed to a cause

Want leaders who take a great view of the agency’s functions, people who take their roles seriously—not themselves seriously.

Your personal leadership role

Have maybe a year to establish yourself

The role the leader takes has to fit

the mission of the institution

the values of the institution

All of us play roles

As parents

As teachers

As leaders

To work the role the leader takes has to fit in three dimensions

You—who you are

No comic actor has ever been able to play Hamlet

The task

Expectations of others

Two things to build on

The quality of the people in the organization

The new demands you make on them

Determined by analysis or

Determined by perception (by looking)

or a combination of both

depends on how you operate

No such things as “leadership traits” or “leadership characteristics”

Some people are better leaders than others

By & large talking about skills

Cannot be taught

But can be learned by most of up

Some people genuinely cannot learn the skills

Never say “I.” Think “we” and say “we.”

Think team

Understand the leader’s job is to make the team function.

An identification with the task and with the group.

This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done

You are visible.

Example from Henry V. He was now king and had to set different standards for himself because he was visible

Have expectations to fulfill

You are constantly on trial

Example: The German ambassador to London who resigned because he didn’t want to see himself as a pimp for the new Edward VII who liked diplomats to give him stag parties

To every leader there is a season

But not quite that simple

People who are good …

when things are pretty routine, but who can’t take the stress of an emergency

in a crisis

Most organizations need somebody who can lead regardless of the weather.

What matters is that the leader works on the basic competences.

Most leaders are self-made. Examples (see pages # 21-23)

The balance decision

One of the key tasks is to balance long range and short range, the big picture and the pesky little details

Seeing only the big picture and forgetting the individual person who sits there (one lonely person in need of help)

Solution: Being on the firing line a few days, a few weeks, a year, usually does it

Opposite danger. Becoming a prisoner of the operations

Much harder to avoid

Solution: Work in associations and other organizations

There are always balancing problems in managing non-profits. This is only one example

Balance between concentrating resources on one goal and enough diversification

Concentrate

Get maximum results

Very risky

Leaves your flanks uncovered

There’s not enough playfulness; it doesn’t stir the imagination

Diversity

Can easily degenerate into splintering

Balance between being too cautious and being rash

Timing: expect result too soon or wait too long

Know your degenerative tendency and try to counteract it

Opportunity and risk

Is the decision reversible?

What kind of risk is it?

Is it a risk we can afford?

Hurt a little

Kill us

The risk we can’t afford not to take

The don’ts of leadership

Just announce decision and leave it to everyone else to understand

Make yourself understood

This is what we were faced with

These are the alternatives we saw, the decisions we considered

What is your opinion?

Be afraid of the strengths in your organization

Pick your successor alone

Hog the credit

Knock your subordinates

Keep your eye on the task, not on yourself

Setting new goals — interview with Frances Hesselbein (Girl Scouts)

The Daisy Scout program

Only 20% of the councils were enthusiastic about the new program. Another 10% were waiting in the wings

Took six months to bring another 40% in

Took 3 years to get all the councils in

Summary #1

Market-driven

Went out

Looked at needs, the wants of the community you serve

Developed a service that was market-driven

Marketed, you have to persuade, you have to create customers for the new mission because they don’t say how high when you say jump

Make the change

Looked for “targets of opportunity”

Ready but not competent

New training for trainers and for leaders

The adult education needed

Making sure that everybody who has to do something

Wonderful handbook for leaders

Has to be educationally sound

Carried out in supportive and helpful way

Leadership from the widest spectrum

Spent as much time making the program attract volunteers as on making the program fit the five year-olds

Recruitment

Placement

Training

They could feel very secure

Increase in number of volunteers

Deserved and required superior learning opportunities.

Management course

Summary #2

General ideas, concepts, rules

Look at the volunteers as your most important market simply because the number of volunteers you can bring in determines how many girls you can serve.

Make a determined, continued effort to find the right people.

Treat them as unpaid staff

Determine their job

Set the standard

Provide the training

Set their sights high

Get their satisfaction out of their work, not the paycheck

Recognition (the support and care of the volunteer organization)

Thank you very much, you’ve made a major contribution.

Minority communities

Look at the population projections

New racial and ethnic composition-an unprecedented opportunity

Most thoughtful kind of planning and including those community leaders in that planning

Working on the target of opportunity

More than one customer

Girls

Volunteers

General conclusions

Carefully construct a marketing plan

Understand all the ways there are to reach people and use them

Need people in the marketing chain

Continuing evaluation

Getting feedback on how you are doing

If a strategy is not working regroup and move ahead in a different way.

What the leader owes — interview with Max De Pree (Herman Miller, Inc. & Fuller Theological Seminary)

The leader is indebted to the organization

A volunteer nation

People choose a leader

What they believe that leader can contribute to the person’s ability to achieve his or her goals in life.

Owes certain assets

The ability to

Recruit the right people

Raise the necessary funds

A legacy:

The values of the organization

Not necessarily the author

Expresses them

Makes them clear

Ensuring to the people in the organization that the values will be lived up to in a way in which decision are made

A vision

Leader is primarily future-oriented

Agreed-upon work processes

If you come to work in this organization, I can promise you that we’re going to have a participatory process

People development needs to be oriented primarily toward the person, and not primarily toward the organization. (a duplicate)

People development needs to be oriented primarily toward the person, and not primarily toward the organization.

When you take the risk of developing people, the odds are very good that the organization will get what it needs.

Building on what people are—not about changing them

Understand

Their gifts

What their potential is

Aim for their potential

A life matter

Look at

The gifts of people, their potential, their strength, what they could be if only they used a little better what they have.

The objective needs, the objective requirements, the opportunities for accomplishment

Make a connection between realizing potential and doing it in a very real environment.

Assign opportunities and assign work that can be realized by that person

Start with what this person is really good at, and then tries to place the person where the strength can redound to performance

Accountability and achievement require us to delegate thoroughly

With a certain abandon so that people have space in which to

Goal achievement vs. realization of our potential applies to organizations as well

Goal achievement is an “annual matter”

Realization of our potential is a “life matter”

A leader

Primarily future-oriented

First duty—Define reality

Be in touch with reality. To …

Be healthy

Have renewal processes

Survive

See for the group what reality is

Have to deserve the person who works for us

They are committed to us by choice

Where they’re going to work

What kind of work they’re going to do

Mid-career changes

Opportunity

For self-realization

For being part of a social body that is attractive and rewarding

For doing work which will help me to reach my potential

To be involved in something meaningful

To be an integral part of something

Young people

What do they have?

Tremendous desire to contribute

How do we use what they have to make them want to belong?

What is it that the non-profit institutions can do to that newcomer, that young person, to acquire self-discipline?

Err on the side of being more demanding

Building a strong team of colleagues

Team held together by a common mission & common vision

imported

Understand the task

What is the job that has to be done?

The key activities of the team

Selecting people

A high-risk process

Have to make some adjustments in assignments

Assign the work very clearly with a lot of interaction

Agree on what the process is going to be for getting the work done

Agree on timetables where those are appropriate

We agree on how we’re going to measure performance

The way we judge the quality of leadership by the tone of the body

Not

The charisma of the leader

How much publicity the company gets or the leader gets

Or any of that stuff

How well the body

Adjust to change?

Deal with conflict?

Meet the needs of the constituency or customers

Deals with succession of the leader

Summary

Leader as the servant of the organization

Indebtness of the leader

The realization that he and the organization owe

Owe customers, clients, the constituency

Followers

To enable people to realize

Summary: The action implications

The mission

Comes first

Non-profit institutions exist:

for the sake of their mission

to make a difference in

If you lose sight of your mission, you begin to stumble and it shows very, very fast

Needs to be though through. Needs to be changed

The basic rationale for the organization may be there for a very long time

Look at the mission again and again to think through whether it needs to be refocused

Because

Vitally important to start out from the outside

The organization that starts from the inside and then tries to find places to put its resources is going to fritter away. Above all, it’s going to focus on yesterday.

Look for an opportunity

Look for a need

The mission is always long-range. It needs short-range efforts and very often short-range results.

Start with the long-range

Where should we be ten years hence?

Then feed back and say, What do we do today?

Action is always short term

Is this action step leading us toward our basic long-range goal? or

Is it going to sidetrack us, going to divert us, going to make us lose sight of what we are here to do?

We need to be result driven

Do we get adequate results for our efforts?

Is this there best allocation?

Leadership

First task is to make sure that everybody…

Sees the mission

Hears the mission

Lives the mission

The leaders’s job

Make sure the right results are being achieved

Make sure the right things are being done

Allocate resources

Leadership is doing

It isn’t

Just thinking great thoughts

Just charisma

Play-acting

First imperative of doing: revise the mission, to refocus it, and to build and organize, and then abandon

The first action command for any mission

The first action requirement: the constant reshaping, the constant refocusing, never really being satisfied.

Think through priorities

Leadership is also example

The leader is visible; he stands for the organization. Represents not only what we are, but, above all, what we know we should be.

Have to live up to the expectations regarding their behavior

When you do anything as a leader, ask,

What do I do …

Take action responsibility.

What are my own first priorities, and what are the organization’s first priorities, what should they be?

You are a leader

We are creating a society of citizens in the old sense of people who actively work, rather than just passively vote and pay taxes

Each is doing a responsible task

Tomorrow’s society of citizens. Everybody…

Is a leader

Is responsible

Acts

Focuses himself or herself

Raises the vision, the competence, and the performance of his or her organization.

Mission and leadership

Not just things to read about, to listen to.

Things to do something about

Things that you can, and should, convert from good intentions and from knowledge into effective action, not next year, but tomorrow morning

From mission to performance: effective strategies for marketing, innovation, and fund development

Converting good intentions into results

Results

Until these things have happened the NPO has had no results; only good intentions

The NPO is not merely delivering a service

It wants the end user to be not a user but a doer

It uses a service to bring about change in a human being

It creates …

Habits

Vision

Commitment

Knowledge

It attempts to become a part of the recipient

Rather than merely a supplier

NPOs need 4 things

Plan (part one)

Marketing (this section)

People (parts 4 & 5)

Money (this section)

Strategies that convert the plan into results

How do we get our service to the “customer,” that is to the community we exist to serve?

How do we market it?

How do we get the money we need to provide the service?

Marketing in a NPO is quite different from selling

More a matter of …

Knowing your market (market research)

Segmenting your market

Looking at your service from the recipient’s point of view

Have to know …

What to sell

To whom

When to sell

Selling an intangible

Something you transform into a value for the customer

Selling a concept, an abstraction

Basic strategy tasks

Design of the right marketing strategy

Marketing must be built into the design of the service

A top management job

Examples

Rules of effective marketing

Needs

Market knowledge

A marketing plan with specific objectives and goals

Marketing responsibility

Which is to take one’s customers seriously. Not saying, We know what’s good for them.

Fund development strategy

Raises money from donors

From people who want to participate in the cause but who are not beneficiaries.

Money is always scarce

Fallacious beliefs

Purpose: Enable the NPO to carry out its mission without subordinating that mission to fund-raising

The term has been changed from “fund-raising” to “fund development”

First constituency in fund development is your own board

Old style (in sympathy) is simply not enough

Need a board…

Need people on the board who are willing to help develop the mass base by giving example and leadership

A few wealthy people used to support … Now the … is more expensive. The demands on people of wealth have gone up out of sight. And proportionately, there are so many fewer of them around. So NPO E must build a mass base. See “compassion fatigue” p 58

Develop a mass base

In fund development …

you appeal to the heart, but

you also have to appeal to the head, and

try to build a continuing effort

NPO manager has to think through how to define result for an effort

Then report back to the donors, to show them that they are achieving results

Have to educate donors so that they can recognize and accept what the results are.

Constituency building over the very long term

See Claremont Colleges

Winning strategies

Introduction

Good intentions don’t move mountains; bulldozers do

In the non-profit management, the mission and the plan—if that’s all there is—are good intentions

Strategies are the bulldozers

About Strategies. They …

Convert what you want to do into accomplishments

Lead you to work for results

Convert intention into action

Convert busyness into work

Tell you what you need to have by way of resources and people to get the results

Are action-focused

Are not something you hope for

Are something you work for

Brown University (a marketing strategy)

Excellent faculty

No distinction

Also ran

Harvard’s little sister

Question: What do we have to do to become a leader despite the tough competition?

Harvard to the north

Yale to the south

And about 12 first-rate liberal arts colleges within an hour’s drive.

Two focuses (goals)

Make women full citizens of the university

Bringing in those women who wanted to go where women supposedly don’t go (the non traditional areas for women)

Systematically recruiting young women who were doing exceptionally well in these areas that tradition doesn’t consider particularly feminine.

Build closeness to the student into the way the university runs

Had strategies for each of these goals

Has become the “in” university for bright kids in the East

This is almost a textbook case of a successful marketing strategy

Recognized changes in the market

Career-focused young women

Desire of students to have a “community”

Then developed specific campaigns to reach his potential customers

Went to work

Improving what we already do well

A clear strategy for improving

How can we do better what we are already doing?

Something very mundane

Very major change

The focus is always on improving

the product

process

the way we work

the way we train

You need a continuing strategy for doing so

To work systematically on the productivity of the institution

Need a strategy for each of the factors of production

People

It’s not a matter of working harder. Its a matter of working smarter

Placing people where they can produce

Money

How do we get a little more out of the money we have?

Time

Need productivity goals—and ambitious ones

Set the goal twice as high as one hopes to accomplish because one will always fall by 50 percent short

Not so high that people say this is absolutely absurd

High enough so that they say: we’ve got to stretch

Constant improvement also includes …

Abandoning the things that no longer work

The innovation objective

In business

3M

What is our innovation strategy?

Where are we going to do something different?

or Where are we going to do the same thing quite differently?

Set the goals

Go to work

For NPO managers, the signposts are less clear

In a mental-health clinic, for instance,

The people in a really successful research laboratory cannot quantify their research results ahead of time

Theses are qualitative measures

Strategy development structure

Example: How does a pastor set a strategy?

Define the goals

What is he trying to do?

Make certain assumptions (p62)

The goal is to build a congregation

What kind of congregation? Not every pastor has the same vision

What are specific results I want?

Whether that market is a church, hospital, Boy Scout troop or a public library you have the same structure for your strategy

The pastor who sees his or her church in terms of large massesÚ

Example: Public library

Look at the ultimate beneficiaries—call them the market—the ultimate clients

Whether that market is a church, a hospital, a Boy Scout troop, or a public library, you have the same structure for your strategy

If you are a public library …

You have …

Think of each of these groups as a separate market

Develop a marketing plan

You will need money

You will have to communicate

You will have to feed back

Steps in strategy development

The goal must be clearly defined

Convert the goal into specific results, specific targets

each focused on a specific audience, a specific market area.

May need a great many such specific strategies

Develop a marketing plan and marketing efforts for each target group

How are you really going to reach this specific segment?

You now need resources

People (above all)

Money

And the allocation of both

Communications—lots of it— and training

Who has to do what, when, and what results

What tools do they need?

In what language do they have to hear it?

Logistics (for lack of a better word)

What resources are required?

Example — Napolean “How many horses does it require”

Feedback and control points

When do we have to see results?

What feedback do you need?

How do you measure your achievement so that you realize …

You need feedback and control points

Process of strategy development

Steps are the same in every organization

How you carry them out depends very much on what kind of an organization you are.

To carry out the process, you need to use both written and verbal communication

Hand out a sheet to everybody

Go down the line

Check it off

Any question on point number …

You talk about it

You invite questions

Encourage people to come back and say “This is what I heard. Am I right that you expect me to do this?

This is much better done in speaking than in writing. Partly because there is less misunderstanding and partly because it’s freer and less formal.

The best example of a winning strategy: The Nature Conservancy

The clear goal …

To preserve as much as possible of God’s ecological diversity of flora and fauna, which is endangered by man

The board members developed on strategy to

Find the places that needed preserving

Get the money to buy them

Manage it (the preserves, the organization & the money)

Strategy don’ts

Don’t avoid defining your goals because it might be thought “controversial”

Hospital example

With strategy, one makes compromise on implementation.

Don’t try to reach different market-segments with the same sales message.

May use the same program

But have to have a different sales message for each group

How to innovate

Introduction

No lack of ideas in NPO

Lack … to convert those ideas into effective results

The successful NPO is organized for the new

Organized to perceive opportunities

See responsibility of top management & then the search for change

Refocus and change the organization when you are successful

This strategy is practically infallible

Resistance

Don’t rock the boat

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Need some character willing to be unpopular and to say, “Let’s improve it”

We have obtained our objectives; now let’s improve on them

If these people are forced out you can expect the organization to go down.

Ask Can’t we do better?

Best rule for improvement strategies is to put your efforts into your successes.

Improve the areas of success and

Change them

Responsibility of top management

As in everything that has to do with the spirit of an organization

The search for changes

Executives of innovative organizations must train themselves to look out the window, to look for change

College

Pastoral church

The change outside is an opportunity

You can force yourself to…

Then you look inside your organization and search for the most important clue pointing the way to changes

Easier to learn to look out the window than to look inside, and that’s also a smart thing

Generally it will be the unexpected success

The requirements for successful innovation

Look at change as a potential opportunity instead of a threat

Faced with a change we should ask

Who is our organization should really work on this?

Most new things need to be incubated

Should be piloted by somebody who

Think through the proper marketing strategy

What are you really trying to do?

The common mistakes (In doing anything new)

Don’t go from idea to full-scale operation. Don’t omit testing the idea.

Don’t omit the pilot stage

If you do, and skip from concept to the full scale, even tiny and easily correctable flaws will destroy the innovation

Don’t go by what “everybody knows” instead of looking out the window

It is usually twenty years out of date

Righteous arrogance. Unwillingness to adapt the innovation to reality

Everything that’s new has a different market from the one the innovator actually expected

Patching up the old rather than to go all-out for the new.

Auto industry example

There comes a point when

Don’t assume that there is just the one right strategy for innovations

Every one requires thinking through anew

When a strategy or action doesn’t seem to be working

If at first you don’t succeed, try once more. Then do something else

The exceptions

Defining the market — interview with Philip Kotler (Northwestern University)

Strategic Marketing for Non-Profit Institutions 4th edition by Philip Kotler

Many institutions confuse marketing with hard selling or advertising

Most important tasks in marketing

Studying the market

Segmenting it

Targeting the groups you want to service

Positioning yourself in the market

Creating a service that meets needs out there

Advertising and selling are afterthoughts

Marketing is finding needs and filling them. It produces positive value for both parties

Marketing starts with customers, or consumers, or groups you want to serve well

Selling starts with a set of products you have, and want to push them out into any market you can find

But isn’t the need the NPO serve obvious?

Many organizations are very clear about the needs they would like to serve, but they often don’t understand these needs from the perspective of the customers. They make assumptions based on their own interpretation of the needs out there

Hospital example p75

Different marketing efforts

Money raising

Segmenting the marketing

Working up the most cost-effective marketing mix of tools for raising money

Recruiting students

Attracting and holding first-rate faculty

The problem marketing has to solve

How do I get the response I want?

The answer marketing gives is that you formulate an offer to put out to the group from which you want a response

The process of getting the answer is called exchange thinking

What must I give in order to get?

How can I add value to the other party in such a way that I add value to what I want?

Reciprocity and exchange underlie marketing thinking

Institutional differentiation

Competition Examples

University / colleges: couple of hundred in the area

Local hospital: maybe 3 in the same area

How important is it?

How do you do it?

Marketing is now thought of as a process of segmenting, targeting, and positioning (STP marketing)

As opposed to LGD marketing—lunch, golf, and dinner, which has its place

Positioning raises the question

How do we put ourselves across to a market we’re interested in?

How do we stand out in some way?

So most organizations engage in the search for their own uniqueness, what we might call a competitive advantage or advantages

Comes by

Cultivating certain strengths

Putting them across as meaningful to the market you’re going after

Example—Hospital

Alternative 1 — offer the normal range of services to the patients

Alternative 2 - identify needs in the community that are not being satisfied

First steps in marketing

Define its markets, its publics

Think through to whom you have to market your product and your strengths

Before you think through the message

Church example

On the one hand, a church should go after every person who wants religious experience, and so on. It should therefore be a diverse institution

On the other hand, marketing would suggest that it would be more successful if it defined its target group. The interesting thing about diversity is that most customers don’t like to be with people who are not like themselves.

The church needs well-defined groups who are looking for one or more particular satisfactions

Market orchestration

How do you orchestrate very diverse groups and have a successful institution?

That alone puts pressure on trying to define your market.

It’s not everyone; but it’s more than one group

The church needs well-defined groups who are looking for one or more particular satisfactions

The mission may well be universal. And yet to be successful …

the institution has to

think through its strategy and

focus on the main target groups in

marketing and

delivering its service

This applies to fund-raising

Careful identification of the appropriate sources of funds and the giving motives

Why does that donor give money?

To whom does the donor give money?

Consumer research is important in the process of trying to direct your efforts

The extent to which a NPO has to mold what they are, do what they can for the market (p 78)

Church example

A community of older people that’s your prime community, but they want a very different church from the one that attracts the singles.

So each church would then have to change what it does to serve its high potential market

May establish different services and different ministries for its different groups

Early services for one group

Later morning service for another

Different leaders and lay ministries serving the different groups

“Boutiques” are very successful for NPO

Translate boutiques into niches

Route of niching versus mass production

Theater groups example

Chicago 120 theatrical groups

Do you want to satisfy one type of audience deeply or do you want to satisfy a number of audiences more superficially?

Museum example

The universal general museums of the nineteenth century

Metropolitan in New York is still the leading American example

No real clientele

Can be too narrow

American Indian in LA

More and more niching

Hospital examples

Community hospital is giving way to boutiques

Free-standing surgical unit

Specialty hospital

We need product differentiation in NPO as much as we need it in business

Poses a problem for 19th century institution

Do they break themselves up?

Problem: being identifiable and yet at the same time not becoming separatist

In a good many institutions

University examples

Those that have done well

Comprehensive universities are losing character in the public mind

I think we will see a good deal of — not niche marketing in the NP section but product identification, as you would call it in a business

The market, very largely, will determine the character of the institution and the character of the product

Why does the NPO have to be interested in marketing and have to be engaged in marketing?

Is it to be sure that it really fulfills the need?

Will it satisfy the customer?

Is it to know what it should focus its energies on?

What are the real reasons for doing marketing for a non-profit institutions?

The presence and the increase in competition

Most organizations don’t get interested in marketing when they are comfortable

Help us understand

Who should really do the marketing job in the NPO?

CEO is the CMO

Yet the CEO can’t do the marketing

The work has to be delegated to someone who is skilled in handling marketing

Director of marketing (has “skills will travel”)

Vice-president of marketing

Policy-making or policy-influencing

Should sit with all the other officers as they try to visualize what the future of their institution will be

How can we tell whether marketing is making a genuine contribution?

Marketing is supposed to build up “share of mind” and “share of heart” for the organization

At any time a NPO has a certain …

level of awareness in its target market

amount of favorable attitude

Good marketing program will build up more … with the public you are trying to serve

awareness

loyalty or bonding

The cost side

Budgets must be developed for the work that must take place

It is very hard to gauge the impact of marketing without setting objectives

For example

Go from 30% of the target market knowing about us,

And 80% of those who know about us, liking us, to 90% of those who know about us liking us

The more specific the objectives, the more likely to be productive

Hospital example

Using their budgets for advertising purposes

Trying to communicate

Wondering: Have they established in the minds of the community

Some CEOs are disturbed about the results

Wrong use

A character to their hospital

True patient focus in their hospital

Haven’t really gone into marketing in the right order

Do some customer research to understand the market you want to serve and its needs

Develop segmentation and be aware of different groups that you’re going to be interacting with

Develop policies, practices, and programs that are targeted to satisfy those groups

Communicate these programs

Haven’t really gone into marketing in the right order

Do some customer research to understand the market you want to serve and its needs

Develop segmentation and be aware of different groups that you’re going to be interacting with

Develop policies, practices, and programs that are targeted to satisfy those groups

Communicate these programs

Hospital who resist to the bitter end the kind of communication their market research shows them the public wants

How many of the people who come in to have hip replacement can walk after six months. Because not everybody does. If we (see page 83)

Fear of falling is the greatest concern among older people

Adopting marketing

NPO with little or no marketing takes 5 to 10 years to really install effective marketing procedures and programs if they’re fully committed to installing them.

Many organizations give up after 1-2 years, especially if the early results are so good that they think they are already there.

More than a department

Everybody’s business

Certainly everybody who has anything to do with the customer

Not a function

Though there is specific work

Basic commitment

The basic action that results in an organization that is both dedicated and positioned to satisfy its basic purpose

Everyone in the organization pursuing one goal

Satisfy the customer

Serve the customer

Getting everyone to understand…

Hard

Takes time

Marketing becomes effective when the organization …

is very clear about what it wants to accomplish

has motivated everyone in the organization to …

agree to that goal

see the worthwhileness of that goal

has taken the steps to implement this vision in a way which

is cost effective

brings about that result

Marketing is …

the work—and it is work—that brings the needs and wants and values of the customer into conformity with the product and values and behavior of the supplier, of the institution

a way to harmonize the needs and wants of the outside world with the purposes and the resources and the objectives of the institution

Building the donor constituency — interview with Dudley Hafner (American Heart Association)

Fund development

Recognizing that your true potential for growth and development is the donor, is someone you want to cultivate and bring along with your program

Helps an organization move forward by having a broad, sound, solid advocacy base. One of the places to develop that is within your giver group

Not simply someone to collect this year’s contribution from

Reduces the cost of getting the money, when you have a donor base that is already sold

You’re going to help them increase their support to the organization

Tools used by the local organization

Acquaint donors with what you are as an organization

What you are trying to get accomplished

So they can identify with your goals

Need a very clear mission

Prevention of premature death and disability from cardiovascular disease and stroke

Very clear goals that relate to our mission

Number of people that we convince to stop smoking or using tobacco or not start in the first place

People change their dietary habits

Biomedical research we want to fund

Process

Present a case for support

The magnitude of the challenge

What we propose to do about it

How realistic it is to achieve that challenge

How your gift can make a difference

Cultivating you

in a series of mailings throughout the year

ask you to get involved in some of our activities

means giving you a chance to make a difference in what it is we’re trying to achieve.

Basic fund development goals

Get people to start giving

Long-term goals for making them “members” in terms of their commitment

Development means

bringing the donors along,

raising their sights in terms of how they support you

giving them ownership in the outcome of your organization

Development requires a long-term strategy

rather than putting together an annual campaign to go out and collect money.

Donor segments

Health community: Donors are really giving to themselves

Large corporate foundation-giver types

Have to think through to whom you make sense, basically

Then appeal to them in a very forceful, forthright manner

Materials / tools for creating constituency

Have a prescribed structure that is offered to the local leadership

Job descriptions

A way for them to formulate goals for now and five years out

Materials that support each one of those elements of the fund-raising

Summary

Focus your message on what in marketing we would call the values of the potential customers

Very clear goals for a marketing campaign in which you market the American Heart Association to potential investors, to people willing to commit themselves, if only in the beginning to a token donation just to get rid of the collector

Door to door fund raising

Don’t go Sunday afternoon during pro football games

How much do you want so I can go back to my TV

Ability to answer questions I get

Effective spokesman for the organization

vs. the emotional appeal “You know how many babies are dying.”

Gets money if there has been a horror story on TV or in the newspaper headlines yesterday

Leave material

Next year

That literature you left was very interesting

Last year you gave …; how about 2.5X (or a target goal based on ability) this year? 50% success rate

Appeal to the rational in the individual as well as the emotional part of the individual

In building local campaigns

Think of the person who does door-to-door

Who is treated as a salesperson by a potential contributor

Opportunity to educate those potential donors about

what they can do … plus their gift

for themselves personally, if it’s a disease

in terms of

Your greatest opportunity to create a long-term strategy

Competition for funds

Well ahead of inflation

Cannot afford to create a strategy that will cause one of them to do better at the expense of another NPO.

Figure out how to get new monies that have not been previously given

Have a long-term really positive impact on the good that the NPO are trying to do.

Most say “We want people who give to nobody but us”

Market research

Because we feel a commitment to the volunteers who go out as our ambassadors

We give them the best possible materials

Things we know will work

Kind of knowledge about the market is relevant

Kinds of prior experience in that person’s life will cause them to be more responsive

What are they dealing with today that is the button you want to press in terms of have them see you as a unique organization?

Rise above the clutter of information out there about

What to buy

What to do with your leisure time

What charitable organizations, volunteer organizations you support

Asking for a specific gift dramatically improves the return in our campaign

Level of income you should give so much

They are usually flattered

Once a donor has given a gift that falls into the suggested amount they should be cultivated (pay special attention): The long-term strategy of upgrading that gift

The long-term strategy of upgrading that gift

First target of opportunity

Pick out the people who give more than suggested

Increase the size of the gift you ask for each year form those people who have given the suggested amount. Gently nudges them to a higher level

Building the relationship

Classify the individual by the kind of follow-up

Personalized thank-you letter

Inviting them to specific activities

Sending an annual report

Showing them what you’re planning to do with the money or how the money has helped

Constant emphasis is on the mission to upgrade your potential high-yield donors

Market research tries to identify

Market segmentation

Forty-one different discrete markets

Any groups that simply aren’t customers at all?

Areas that you don’t want to put a lot of time in because your contribution base is not going to grow that much

More that just raising money

Cannot build your long-term growth strategies, income strategies, on that philosophy, however. It has to be built on cultivating the larger donors and raising their sights

Market value expectations

Fund development

Go where the money is

Look upon fund development as an educational campaign

To get money

Strengthen the objectives of the American Heart Association

Justification for having a broad-based annual campaign

Strategy for your fund development

Know what you expect out of the various strategies, what your return expectations are

Measure your success against that

Larger givers, you have one strategy and one expectation

Smaller givers, another strategy and another expectation

Strategy definition

How we use our resources to get the attention of that individual to do what it is we hope he or she will do

Always focused on the individual

Strategy development for a segment

People age 50 (high risk age)

Show these individual how they can reduce their risk of heart attack

How research or education is going to have immediate feedback, because that’s their interests

Provide something they can relate to—and give to at the same time

Information provided to fund-raisers

Information about the potential donors before they go to them

If this is a fifty-year-old man you use strategy A, and a twenty-five-year old woman you use strategy B

Receive material of most interest based on the neighborhood in which you live

General statements

Emerging for the future (p 95)

Organizing around value groups

Value group

An identified market

with their own materials

their own strategies

their own support system

Critical factors

The care and treatment and cultivation of the donor

Ask for a gift that is in relationship to the individual’s ability to give

Give you

Long-term, stable growth

Broad-based advocacy

Identification of potential donors (donor acquisition) ? disappointing results from investing considerable resources

Volunterism

Applies to all NPOs (big & small, local)

Summary

The central importance of the clear mission

The importance of knowing your market, not just in generalities, but in fine detail

Enabling those volunteers of yours to do a decent job by giving them the tools that make it almost certain that they can succeed

Don’t appeal to the heart alone, and you don’t appeal to the head alone

You have to have a very rational case, but

You also must appeal to our sense of responsibility for our brethren

Do you really need volunteers? p97

Computer

TV

Telemarketing

Many organizations facing a crisis

When you lose your volunteer base, you lose your constituency, the course of strength and growth in the organization

Technology as a way of helping the volunteers do a more effective job

Summary

Fund development is people development

Both for donors and volunteers

You are building …

a constituency

understanding

support

satisfaction

human satisfaction in the process

That is the way …

To create the support base you need to do your job

You use your job to enrich the community and every participant

It is based on

Clear mission

Extensive and detailed knowledge of the market

Making demand on both your volunteers and donor

Feedback from your performance

Most organizations are pretty weak

This applies to purely local and small organizations as well

A lot of well-meaning people, but very often have no sense of direction

A need, but no message

Summary: The action implications

About strategy

Strategy converts mission and objectives into performance

Strategy ends with selling efforts

Strategy begins with knowing the market

Who the customer

Is

Should be

Might be

The whole point of strategy is not to look at recipients as people who receive bounty, to whom the non-profit does good.

They are customers who have to be satisfied

Three strategies

Needs a marketing strategy that integrates the customer and the mission

Needs strategies to improve all the time and to innovate

The two overlap

Nobody can ever quite say where an improvement ends and an innovation begins

When introducing something new (innovation) careful thought and planning is required

Where to start

With whom

Look for a target of opportunity

The strategy in innovation is to think through this process at the start, so that you can identify somebody…

The worst thing in strategy

Knowing the customer enables to know what results to expect.

Needs a strategy to build its donor base

Needs to develop a donor constituency

Don’t say “Here is the need.” “This what you need. These are the results. This what we do for you.”

Look upon the donor as a customer. (The essence of strategy)

All three strategies begin with research and research and more research

Organized efforts to find out

who the customer is

what is value to the customer

how the customer buys

The important person to research

The individual who should be the customer

The person who are believers but who have stopped going to church

Non-customers always outnumber customers

The most important knowledge is the potential customer

Training your own people

Everyone in the hospital must be patient-conscious.

That’s a training job—not just preaching.

It isn’t attitude, its behavior

Behavior training. This is what you do

Train the volunteers (may be even more essential)

Where they are the interface with the customers, with the public.

Need to organize itself to abandon

What no longer …

works

contributes

serves

If not built in …

Soon overload

Put good resources where the results don’t follow

The question always before the non-profit executive

What should our service do for the customer that is of importance to that customer?

Think through how the service should be

structured,

offered

staffed

Nuts and bolts

What to do

When to do

Where to do

Who is to do

Strategy

Begins with the mission

Leads to a work plan

End with the right tools

A kit, say for volunteers, which tells them

Without the kit there is no strategy

Who to call on

What to say

How much money to get

The last thing to say about strategy that it exploits an opportunity,

The right moment. The point when the new is received

Needs are likely to be there forever in one form another

They are part of the human condition.

But the need presents itself in a specific form

Strategy

Commits the non-profit executive and the organization to action

Its essence is action

Putting together mission, objectives, the market—and the right moment

The tests of strategy are results

Begins with needs and ends with satisfaction

Need to know what the satisfaction should be for your customer

What is really meaningful to them?

Listen to their values and understand their satisfactions

Managing for performance: how to define it; how to measure it

What is the bottom line when there is no “bottom line”?

NPOs tend not to give priority to performance and results

Yet performance and results are far more… than in a business

important

difficult

In a business, there is a financial bottom line

Profit and loss are not enough by themselves to judge performance

but at least they are something concrete

A NPO E faces a risk-taking decision when you try to think through your performance

First think through the desired result

Then the means of measuring performance and results can be determined

How is performance for this institution to be defined?

Examples

Hospital emergency room

How fast the staff sees people who come in?

The number of heart-attack victims who pull through the first few hours after they arrive?

Church

What is the performance of a church?

Either is perfectly respectable

Leads to very different ways of running the church.

A organization to tackle AIDS

Does not have to worry about the need for its efforts

But it must be clear whether its performance is to be measured by …

Not enough to say we serve a need. Really good ones create a want.

Example — Museums

From cultural custodians

To creating customers for taste, for beauty, for inspiration

As NPO E begin to define the performance that makes the mission of their institution operational two common temptations have to be resisted

Recklessness

So easy to say the cause is everything, and if people don’t want to support it, too bad for them

Performance means concentrating available resources where the results are

Go for the easy results rather that for results that further the mission

Avoid overemphasis on

Example — Universities & “Mickey Mouse” chairs

These temptations have the same root

The NPO doesn’t get paid for performance

Even if it charges fees, it can only generate a fraction of the funds it needs to operate

In business, performance is what the customer is willing to pay for.

NPO do not get paid for performance

But it does not get money for good intentions, either.

Planning for performance

Performance in the NPO must be planned

This starts with the mission

NPO fail to perform unless they start out with their mission

The mission defines what results are in this particular non-profit institution

Then one asks: Who are our constituencies, and what are the results for each of them?

One of the basic differences between businesses and non-profits is that non-profits always have a multitude of constituencies

About business

NPOs have a multitude of constituencies (each with a veto power) and each has to be satisfied at least to the point where they don’t have a “negative reaction”

Examples

First task — but also the toughest — of the NPO E is to get all these constituencies to agree on what the long-term goals of the institution are.

Building around the long-term is the only way to integrate all theses interests

If you focus on short-term results, they will all jump in different directions

Defining the fundamental change that the NPO wants to make in society and in human beings

Project that goal onto the concerns of each of the institution’s constituencies

Think through the concerns of each of the institution’s constituencies

Integrating constituency goals into the institution’s mission is almost an architectural process, a structural process.

Not too difficult to do once it’s understood

It’s hard work

Moral vs. economic causes

Illustration

imported

Thinking through what results will be demanded of the non-profit institution can protect it from squandering resources because of confusion between moral and economic causes.

NPO — almost impossible to abandon anything

Have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes

Moral cause is an absolute good

The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased

Economic causes: Is this the best application of our scarce resources?

There is so much work to be done

Let’s put our resources where the results are

We cannot afford to be righteous and continue this project where we seem to be unable to achieve the results we’ve set for ourselves

Have a duty toward its … to allocate its scarce resources for results rather than to squander them on being righteous.

Donors

Customers

Staff

NPO are human-change agents

Their results are therefore always a change in people—in their…

Behavior

Circumstances

Vision

Health

Hopes

Competence and capacity (above all)

The NPO has to judge itself by its performance in creating

Vision

Standards

Values and commitment

Human competence

NPO need to set specific goals in terms of its service to people

NPO needs to constantly raise these goals—or its performance will go down

Don’t’s and Do’s — The basic rules

Disregarding them will damage and may even impair performance

The Don’t’s

Seeing the institution as an end in itself

Does it service our mission?

Does it fit our rules?

Inhibits performance

Destroys vision and dedication

Example: How the hospital handled the nursing shortage.

Testing moves, decisions, policies

In every move, every decision, in every policy, the NPO needs to start out by asking, Will this advance our capacity to carry out our mission?

It should start with the end result, should focus outside-in rather than inside out

Feuding and bickering

This is not the dissent of decision making

Must not be tolerated

Destroys the spirit of an organization

Symptoms of the need to change the organization

Fast growth/outgrown its structure

Meal on wheels example p 114

Are you organized for yesterday rather than today?

When the noise level rises, its a sign of discomfort

Your organization structure and the reality of your operations aren’t congruent anymore

Tolerate discourtesy

Manners are the social lubricating oil that smoothes over friction

Bad manners rub people raw; they do leave permanent scars.

Learn to be courteous. It needed to enable different people who don’t necessarily like each other to work together

Do

Build the organization around information and communication instead of around hierarchy

Everyone all the way up and down should be expected to take information responsibility

Especially upward communication

Their colleagues

Ask

What information do I need to do my job

What information do I owe others so that they can do their job

Mayo Clinic example

In the information-based institution people must take responsibility for informing their bosses and their colleagues

Responsibility for

Requires

This builds mutual trust (see p 116)

Delegation

Clear rules to become productive

It requires

The delegated task must be clearly defined

Mutually understood goals

Mutually agreed-on deadlines

Above all

Delegators must follow up

They are still accountable for performance

The delegatee must inform the delegator of anything unexpected that happens, and not to say, “But I can take care of it.”

Standard setting, placement, appraisal

Standards

For each person to take responsibility for … requires standards

own contribution and

being understood

Standards have to be …

Concrete

Set high (world class)

Clear

Uniform

The NPO that is both centrally run and a “confederation” of autonomous locals.

Clear standard are particularly important

Standards have to be uniform across the board

Each local organization has to be autonomous and has to make its own decisions

Squaring these conflicting demands for autonomy and conformity requires

Need control of standards

People

Placement

Standards should be very high and goal should be ambitious

Yet they should be attainable, at least by the star performers of the institution

Need to work hard at placing people where they can perform

Need to place people where their strengths are relevant to the assignment

Then one can legitimately make demands on people

Use star performers to raise the … of the entire organization

One features performers

Appraisal

People need to know how they do

Volunteers more than anyone else

Once goals and standards are clearly established, appraisal becomes possible.

The responsibility of the superior

People who do the work appraise themselves

Start with what the person has done well

It is the function of any organization to make human strengths effective in performance and to neutralize human weaknesses. This is the ultimate test.

The outside focus

Force you people, and especially your executives, to be on the outside often enough to know what the institution exists for

Get out in the field and actually work there again and again

Try to simulate being a customer

Don’t let people stay forever in a staff position in the office

The effective decision

Everything comes together in the decision

Make or break point of the organization

Either make decisions effectively or render themselves ineffective

The least effective decision makers are the ones who constantly make decisions

The effective ones …

Make very few

Concentrate

On decisions

Involve risk taking

Effective decisions take a lot of time and thought

One doesn’t make unnecessary decisions

Painful reorganizations

Don’t make decisions on trivia

Routine decisions are decisions that have no consequences, or at least foreseeable consequences. Don’t waste time on them

What is the decision really about?

The most important part of the effective decision

Very rarely is a decision about what it seems to be about. That’s usually a symptom

Examples

Girl Scout Council

Ethnic composition of the area was changing rapidly

Had to offer scouting to the children of the newcomers

Enormous cost of providing scouting to very poor neighborhoods

The question that seemed to demand a decision was seen as a financial one. How do we raise the money? And the answer seemed obvious: Have separate troops for different ethnic groups

What is the decision all about

We have emphasize that young women are young American women

Whole community accepted that decision without a murmur, once it was explained

Major university

Severe budget problems

Had to accept that it must cut programs

Which ones

A financial decision: Where do we spend the most?

Faculty civil war

We are tackling the wrong issue

We should be tacking the question… The rest is implementation

A strategic decision, and halfway measures won’t do

Opportunity and risk

Opportunity: If this works, what will it do for us?

Risk

The risk we can afford to take

If it goes wrong, it is easily reversible with minor damage

The irreversible decision

Failure does serious harm

The risk is great but one cannot afford not to take it

Hospital example

The need for dissent

They should be controversial

Acclamation means that nobody has done the homework

What is right? Not who is right?

Each see a different reality

Instead of arguing what is right, assume that each faction has the right answer. But which question is each trying to answer?

Then you gain understanding

In many cases you also gain the ability to bring the two together in a synthesis

Creates mutual respect

Honest disagreement

Any organization needs a nonconformist

If and when things change, it needs somebody who is willing and able to change

Says what is the right way now? Not there is a right way and a wrong way

You want a critic—and one the organization respects

Enables NPO to brush aside the unnecessary, the meaningless, the trivial conflict

Don’t resolve the conflict, but you do make it irrelevant

Enable concentration on the real issues

Conflict resolution

You use dissent and disagreement to resolve conflict

Ask for disagreement openly

Who the objectors are

What their objections are

Can accommodate them so that they can accept the decision gracefully

Ask the two most vocal opponents to sit down and work out a common approach

They start out in the areas in which they agree

Defusing the argument

Let’s start out by finding out what we agree on

On essential there is common ground and you can work things out

Let’s split the difference

Let’s postpone this

Is this really that important

From decision to action

Causes for decisions that remain pious intentions

Try to “sell” the decision rather than trying to “market” it

Ask everyone who will be affected by the decision — and especially everyone who will have to do something to carry it out — to comment before the decision is made

Going systemwide immediately with the new policy or new service

Don’t try to convert everybody right away

3 different people. 3 different places

See p 128

Someone has to be designated to carry it out

Accountable with

Nobody really though through who had to do what

In what form should the decision be communicated to each person who has to implement that decision go that he or she can actually act?

What training does each need?

What tools

Translate a decision into the language of the people who have to do the work

Have to fit the decision to their assumptions

Build the new behavior into their …

Follow up

Go and look

Decisions will turn out to be wrong more often than right. At least they will have to be adjusted

The decision always has to be bailed out

Think through alternatives ahead of time so that you have something to fall back on if and when things go wrong.

Build into the decision the responsibility for bailing it out.

How to make the schools accountable — interview with Albert Shanker (American Federation of Teachers)

A leader in the crusade to

improve performance in the classroom

make teachers and schools accountable for performance

build the school around the classroom teacher

Performance in the school

What kind of human being are we trying to produce?

Performance dimensions

Knowledge

Being able to

enter the world as a participating citizen and

perform in the economy

Growth of the individual and participation in the cultural life of society

Assess achievement

longer range

Learning

Not memorization & instant forgetting

Something that becomes part of you

Teaching

Should be done on an adult level

Public may have given up on many of our public institutions

The employees have

their jobs

their security

their tenure

their Civil Service regulations

really stopped trying

They are just doing … whether it works or not

Summary: the action implications

Performance is the ultimate test of any institution

Exists for the sake of performance in changing people and society

The temptation to downplay results

To say … is not enough

We are serving a good cause

We are doing the Lord’s work

We are doing something to make life a little better for people and that’s a result in itself

Wasting resources on non-results

Donor’s money — Accountable to donors for

putting the money where the results are, and

performance

Results

How well are you doing in terms of the resource you spent?

What return do you get?

Parable of the Talents in the New Testament: Our job is to invest the resources we have — people and money — where the results are manifold. And that’s quantitative term

Kinds of results

Immediate results

Long-term job of building on those first results

Defining results in such a way that one can ask

Are we getting better?

Are we improving?

Do we put our resources where the results are?

Results are always outside the organization, not inside

Results for the school teacher are kids who learn

The right allocation of resources to the mission, to goals, to results

Start with the mission

That is exceedingly important

What do you want to be remembered for as an organization—but also as an individual?

The mission transcends today, but guides today, informs today

From the mission, one goes to very concrete goals

Only when a non-profits’s key performance areas are defined can it really set goals

Only then can ask… (performance evaluation)

Are we doing what we are supposed to be doing?

Is it still the right activity?

Does it still serve a need?

Do we still produce results that are

Every so often: Are we still in the right area? Should we change? Should we abandon?

Need to define performance for each of the non-profit’s key areas

Think through the key performance areas for this organization.

Focus on each of them

In a non-profit institution, where people want to serve a cause, you always have the challenge of getting people to perform so that they grow on their own terms. They are then accomplished and fulfilled, and that makes its way down to the performance of the organization.

Results are achieved by concentration, not by splintering

The courage to say (strength concentration analysis)

This is not for us. Other people do it better

This not really what we are good at

This is not where we can make the greatest contribution. It does not really fit the strength we have

There we are not competent; we can only do harm

Need alone does not justify our moving in. We must match our strength, our mission, our concentration, our value

Good intentions, good policies, good decisions must turn into effective actions

This is what we are here for

This is how we do it

This is the time span in which we do it

This is who is accountable

This is the work for which we are responsible

Lovely plan

Magnificent statement of policy

Work is only done when it is done

Done by people

The ultimate question, people in NPO should ask again and again, and again (major feedbacks)

What should I hold myself accountable for by way of contribution and results?

What should this institution hold itself accountable for by way of contribution and results?

What should both this institution and I be remembered for?

People and relationships: your staff, your board, your volunteers, your community

People decisions (hire, fire, place, promote, develop, teams, personal effectiveness)

Introduction

People decisions are the ultimate—perhaps the only—control of an organization

People determine the performance capacity of an organization

No organization can do better than the people it has

Can only hope to recruit and hold the common run of humanity (unless it is a very small organization—a string quartet)

Effective NPO E must try to get more out of the people he or she has.

The yield from the human resource really determines the organizations performance

That’s decided by the basic people decisions

Whom we hire

Whom we fire

Where we place people

Whom we promote

The quality of these human decisions largely determines whether … rather than just public relations and rhetoric

the organization is being run seriously

its mission, its values, and its objectives are real and meaningful

Rules for making good people decisions

Objective: To place people who perform in assignments that match their strengths

See measuring “Management Performance” for database requirements

Not judges of people

A diagnostic process

The selection process

Start with an assignment

Not merely with a job description

Look at several people

Focus on performance

Not personality

Not silly questions

Right questions

Look at people’s specific strengths

What have they shown they can do in their last three assignments

Decide which is the right person for this assignment

Go to two or three people with whom this “right person” has worked

If they say my only regret is that this person no longer works for me, then go ahead and make the job offer

If I wouldn’t take the person back, start thinking again

90 days later (A reminder)

Call the person in and say: You have been on the job 90 days. Think through what you have to do to be successful, and come back and tell me.

When they return you can finally judge whether you have selected the right person for the assignment.

How to develop people

Introduction

Any organization develops people, it has no choice

Either helps them to grow or it stunts them

Either forms them or it deforms them

Informal learning and training have exploded

Lessons learned by large non-profit institutions in training people

Developing people

What not to do

Don’t try to build on people’s weaknesses

Don’t try to take a narrow and shortsighted view of the development of people.

Have to learn specific skills for a specific job. But development is more than that: it has to be for a career and for a life. The specific job must fit into this longer-term goal.

Don’t establish crown princes or “comers”

Look always at performance, not at promise

The pastor — the cradle of leader

Focus on performance and make high demands

Two rules that help us understand what needs to be done

Learn to place people’s strengths

The lesson is to focus on strengths. Then make really stringent demands

Take the time and trouble (it’s hard work) to review performance.

For all this to come together …

The worst thing an organization can do is limit its development of people by importing society’s class system into its own operations

Deciding very early which are the comers

Or that you are not going to get any place if you don’t have an MBA from the Harvard Business School

Performance is what counts. Not in one job, in a series of jobs

People don’t always get along with a boss. So, you try them in another job

If they try, work with them

If they don’t try, you’re better off if they work for the competition.

Things that are particular to the NPO

A good many people don’t work for a living, they work for a cause

Volunteers

Development tools

Measure themselves by the development of their staff and volunteers.

Given responsibility. Allowed to spread their wings and have autonomous commands.

Use them as teachers. (Most important way to develop)

Push them outside

Top-performing subordinates put pressure on bosses

Why can’t we do more?

Why can’t we do better?

Building the team

The more successful an organization becomes, the more it needs to build teams

The organization outgrows what one person with helpers can do

Teams don’t develop themselves—they require systematic hard work. They require a team approach to management

Team Building Process

You don’t start out with the people, you start with the job: What are we trying to do?

Labor organization example

What are the key activities needed to achieve our results?

Identify individual strengths

Match the strengths with key activities

Decide what kind of team based on the task and based on the people

Types …

Tennis double team

Baseball team

Soccer

Very hard to predict

One of the great mistakes that people make — When you change your leadership you don’t necessary maintain the kind of team you are because what kind of team suits is determined by personalities, very much.

Who plays what position based on the strengths of people

Common mistake

Is to believe that because individual are all on the same team, they all think alike and act alike

Not so.

Purpose of team is to make the strengths of each person effective, and their weaknesses irrelevant

One manages individuals on a team

The focus is to look at the performance and the strengths of individuals combined in a joint effort.

Role of the team leader

Writes the score, and conducts it

Something I represent rather than something I am

The power of language

Personal effectiveness on the job

Once the right match is made between key activities and strengths.

Understand clearly what the person is going to do and doesn’t ride off in all directions

Each person takes the responsibility for thinking through what he or she needs to do the job

Go to all others on whom he depends

Go and ask. Don’t write memos

Do this every six months

Enable

People who … to do it

Want to do the job

Are paid for doing the job

Supposedly have the skills to do the job

Give them

The tools they need

The information they need

Get rid of the things

That trip them up

Hamper them

Slow them down

Go ask

As the organization grows

What does our top management really have to know?

The tough decision

A competent staff wherever performance is needed

Repotting the bored executive

The succession decision (at the top)

Most critical, hardest to undo

What not to do

Don’t want a carbon copy

Be a little leery of the faithful assistant. Never made a decision alone

Anointed crown prince. They are media events rather than performers

Positive ways

Look at the assignment

In this … what is going to be the biggest challenges over the next few years?

Look at the people and their performance

Match the need against proven performance

Ability to attract and to hold committed people

Are we attracting the right people?

Are we holding them?

Are we developing them?

Ask all three question about the organization’s people decisions.

Are we attracting people we are willing to entrust this organization to?

Are we developing them so that they are going to be better than we are?

Are we holding them, inspiring them, recognizing them?

Are we, in other words, building for tomorrow in our decisions, or are we settling for the convenient and the easy today?

The key relationships

NPOs have a multitude of constituencies and has to work out the relationship with each of them

The board

To be effective, a NPO needs a strong board, but a board that does the board’s work

Board duties

Helps think through the institution’s mission

The guardian of that mission

Makes sure the organization lives up to its basic commitment

Makes sure the NPO has competent management—and the right management

Appraise the performance of the organization

In a crisis, may have to be firefighters

The premier fund-raising organ

Members put the organization first and foremost on their own list of donations

Board must

Understand its real obligation

Set goals for its own performance

CEO

Very hard work to

Bring the right people onto the board

Meld them into a team

Point them in the right direction

Conscience of the board

A nominating process is the best way to get people on the board. See p 158

Membership on this board in not power, it is responsibility

Not recognition by the community

Responsibility to the

organization

board

staff

institution’s mission

Age limit

The last activity many older people have. They want to hang on to it.

Two terms of three years each. After that they go off the board. Three years later they may come back on again.

At age 72 it off the board and stay off

The badly split board

Some issue that is fought out every time it comes up

The role of the board then becomes both more important and more controversial

Teamwork between chairperson and chief executive officer is vital

Two-way relationships

Only two way relationships work

Cast supports the star

Star delivers an outstanding performance

Supporting cast is suddenly lifted out of its mediocrity

Everybody has a new dimension

Between the E NPO E and …

Staff

Board

Community

Donors

Volunteers

Alumni

Bringing out problems into the open

Start by asking: What do you have to tell me? Not, This is what I am telling you

Bring out problems in the open

Many are non-problems “pebbles in the shoe”

True test of a relationship is not that it can solve problems but that it can function despite problems

Relations with the community

NPOs serve one specific community interest

Have to maintain relations with

Governmental agencies

All other institutions in the community

The community’s people in general

Not PR (but you need good PR). Requires the service organization live its mission

Volunteers are important in this

They live in the community

They exemplify the institution’s mission

Should train volunteers to represent them in the community

Should make it easy for volunteer to report back any question the community has about the work of the institution

The hospital example

Two week after discharge follow up

End of year reminder—We haven’t forgotten you

Improve its community standing

From volunteers to unpaid staff — interview with Father Leo Bartel (Social ministry of the Catholic Diocese)

From “helpers” to “colleagues” or “unpaid staff”

Now in leadership positions in the Church and in Church work

Formal training program

Two-year period

Seven courses

Scriptures

Communications

Evangelization

Theology

For people who have shown ability

The kind of training that will make them effective, give them a sense of being qualified

Quality control

The common vision

Dedicated people

The biggest difficulty in asking people to serve is that they are painfully aware of their lack of experience and lack of preparation

We must

Encourage them

Cheer them on

Praise them

Help them

Be there to support them

Hold them to high standards

In many cases they are flattered by that

Use the common management tools

Spend time together trying to … that we can all share

Develop opportunities

Treat as staff members. Performance is performance

Management and development of people

Inspiration. How to excite and motivate folks who are apathetic

Inspire the leaders (the top 10%). If you lose them you lose everybody

Remember the difficulty Jesus had with the Apostles. Don’t you understand

If it had been sixty

12 handpicked, very exceptional young people

Work with the leaders

The job of the leader is to set high standards, by example

Once there is a precedent, then it can be done again

Organization: Getting board and council members to do the sort of paperwork, the sort of planning work, they really must do in order to be effective in their roles on councils or boards?

Make sure you are not abdicating your responsibility.

Boards have to be given their work plan

They need leadership, they need to know what the parish needs from them.

We need planning. We don’t need you to clean the floors, we need you to plan

I need someone I can talk with freely

The parish needs you to plan ahead the money-raising campaign for next year

It needs you to think through whether we should rebuild the school through six grade

Then there are board assignments

Are you willing to …

Use the tremendous asset, the board

Its excitement

Willingness

Commitment

Guiding principle you have in managing a heterogeneous group of volunteers, and a rapidly growing one?

The dignity of each person

The task

A person is never going to have a sense of their own dignity unless they are able to fulfill the expectation of completing the tasks and discharging the responsibilities that they take on.

One needs faith and works

Helping people achieve

Help a few people get the right things done

The effective board — Interview with Dr. David Hubbard (Fuller Theological Seminary)

The functions of the board

A partnership between the board and the professional staff

Organization chart

imported

Three centers of power

Three centers of authority

My task

Promote … between those centers

Keep them running in parallel so they don’t pull apart or collide

Board’s role

It owns the organization

Not for its own sake but for the sake of the mission.

Because they care

In partnership

Governors

“I so move”

Sponsors

Give money

The leader in raising money

Ambassadors

Interpreting the mission

Defending it when it’s under pressure

Representing it in their constituencies and communities

Consultants

Some professional skill which would be expensive if you had to buy it.

Active board members

Regular trustee meetings

Serves on committees

Available for consultation

Leaders in raising money

Time commitment

8 to 10 days per year

Board meetings (3 times a year)

At least a one hour session when board members can form their own agenda on the spot. Open forum

Special committee assignment

Extra reading

Entertaining on behalf of the institution

Serving in some way in their own community

Study tours

Creating the partnership

The way the mission of the institution is stated

Sufficient breadth to allow for flexibility

Welcoming of change

Need people who are open to that mission

If the board becomes inflexible

Look for ways of renewing the board with fresh appointments

Fuller arrangement

The investment of the CEO and the staff in servicing the trustees

Making the board effective and keeping it effective: A priority task

CEO’s two primary areas of service

Care for the vice-presidents

Care for the trustees

Balancing board involvement with the possibility of board meddling

Meddling

Take that innovative energy and channel it into the process

Talk about the concern in the board meeting

Playing games with the board

Don’t

Share the bad news first at 110 percent

Share the good news at 90 percent

No surprises

Getting the board to change its position

To adopt a change in an old, outmoded, but cherished policy

Work for a win situation

Try to help the trustees change their minds or to expand their vision without feeling that they are letting go of their cherished goals.

Done one on one

See page 176

Avoiding the board splitting into factions (p 176)

Talk to the people who would be viewed as the point person on a particular issue

Working with outside boards

Don’t try to be clever & outsmart them

What do we all have in common

Summary

It is to the benefit of an institution to have a strong board

Your depend on the board

You can be more effective with a … that with a rubber stamp. Which won’t rubber stamp when you most need it

To get this strong board, the NPO E has to do a lot of very hard work

Requires

Continuing work to find the right people and to train them

They come in knowing what you expect of them, and they have very tough expectation in terms of time and money and work and responsibility

A great deal of time to keep the board informed but also to have a two-way flow of information

Building relationships with the board is crucial, central part of the task of the CEO

Summary: The action implications

Complexity of relationships

Paid staff and “volunteers”

Paid staff

Need more than paychecks & promotions

What’s the point of working in a non-profit institution if one doesn’t make a clear contribution?

Volunteers

Not paid - the only difference

Donors

Have different expectations from business customers or shareholders

Board

More active than business boards

More of a resource if managed properly

More of a problem if not managed properly

The tool of the non-profit chief executive

The chief executive’s conscience

For this relationship to prosper

The chief executive must develop a clear work plan for the board.

Can manage a board

Even a board that is elected by outside (sometimes critical) forces and that cannot be dismissed by the professional executive

The board must be informed

Must build an overall relationship

People (volunteers, board, employed staff) need clear assignments for which they themselves take responsibility

Need to know what the institution expects of them

The responsibility for developing the work plan, the job description, and the assignment should always be on the people who do the work

Think through their contribution

Spell it out clearly

Everyone needs first to think through his or her own assignment

What should this institution hold me accountable for?

Make sure that the people with whom you work and whom you depend understand what you intend to concentrate on, and what you should be held accountable for.

Evolve by joint discussion

a specific work plan, with

specific goals and

specific deadlines

Must be information based

Structured around information

Flows up from individuals doing the work to people at the top

and around information flowing down, too

Learning organization?

Emphasis on managing people should always be on performance

They owe performance, and the executive owes them compassion.

Must also be compassionate

People work for non-profits because they believe in the cause

People given a second chance usually come through

If people try, given them a second chance

If they still do not perform, they may be in the wrong spot. “Where should he or she be?

If people don’t try at all, encourage them as soon as possible to go to work for the competition.

On people attracted to NPO

Profoundly lonely

Cannot work with other people

A job in some corner, which they can do. If there isn’t they must be asked to leave

Learning and teaching responsibilities

Learning (CEO only?)

Not in 5 years, but now — over the next few months

Questions

What do I have to learn?

What does this organization have to learn?

Aspirations, opportunities, threats, good & bad performance, improvements (for executives)

Next week—with key people

I’m not here to tell you anything. I am here to listen

Questions—External

What do I need to know about you and your aspirations for yourself—and for this organization of ours?

Where do you see opportunities that we don’t seem to be taking advantage of?

Where do you see threats?

What are we doing well?

What are we doing badly?

What improvements do we have to make?

Make sure to listen.

Make sure to take action on what you hear and learn.

How I help or hamper you? (for executives)

Ask everyone of the people who report to you or with whom you work

Questions—Internal

What am I doing that helps you with your work?

What am I doing that hampers you?

Act on what they tell you

The non-profit executive’s job is to enable them to do their jobs

May need clear information about the results of your organization’s work

What are the results?

No executive should respond with generalities

Take responsibility for making it easy for people to…

Do their work

Have results

Enjoy their work

Make sure that people get results.

Developing yourself: as a person, as an executive, as a leader

You are responsible

First priority for the NPO E is to strive for excellence

Brings satisfaction & self-respect

Workmanship counts

Not just because it makes such a difference in the quality of the job done

But because it makes such a difference in the person doing the job

Without craftsmanship there is neither

A good job

Nor self-respect

Nor personal growth

Be remembered for being a first-rate … (occupation)

Drucker’s dentist

Avoid the temptation to just get by and hope nobody notices

Self-development

Deeply meshed in with…

The mission of the organization

Commitment and belief that the work done in this organization matters

Pay serious attention to self-development — your own and that of everyone in the organization (is not a luxury for NPO E)

Well-run, results-oriented organization

Should be making such demands on people for time and work that it’s unlikely too many with that jaded outlook would stay on

Want constructive discontent

The key to building an organization with such a spirit is organizing work so everyone feels essential to a goal they believe in

Goal is that everyone work at the equivalent level of a minister in the church

The letter

Twice a year

To yourself (copy to the pastor)

What have I learned?

What difference to my own life has my work with kids at the church been making?

To make a difference

The person with the most responsibility for an individual’s development is the person himself.

Encourage everyone to ask themselves:

What should I focus on so that, if it’s done really well, it will make a difference both to the organization and to me?

Creating a record of performance

Will encourage people to trust you and support you

Talk to those on whom you depend and who depend on you, to find out in a systematic way

what helps,

what hinders,

what needs to be changed

Review what you have done once or twice a year

What they have actually done

Which part of that work makes sense

What they should concentrate on

PFD’s review. Focusing on where he can make a difference

Two weeks in August

Review work over the past year

Where have I made an impact?

Where do my clients need me? Not just where they want me but need me?

Where have I been wasting their time and mine?

Where should I concentrate next year so as not only to give my best but also to get the most out of it?

Making Personal Vision productive

Only by focusing effort in a thoughtful and organized way allows the NPO E to move (to the big step in self-development) How to move beyond simply aligning their vision with that of the organization to making that personal vision productive

Enable the organization to see itself as having a bigger mission that the one it has inherited

PFD’s review. Focusing on where he can make a difference

Senior people must sit down regularly with each other and consider the questions together

The critical factor is holding yourself accountable

Self-development summary

Self-development seems to me to mean both acquiring more…

Capacity

Weight as a person altogether

By focusing on accountability, people take a bigger view of themselves. That’s not vanity, not pride, but it is self-respect and self-confidence. Its something that, once gained, can’t be taken away from a person. It’s outside of me but also inside of me.

Setting an example

A constant relationship between the performance and achievement of the leaders, the record setters, and the rest

Stand on the shoulders of our predecessors.

The leaders set the vision, the standard.

If one member of an organization does a markedly better job, others challenge themselves.

Executives lead by example

Greatest example is precisely the dedication to the mission of the organization as a means of making yourself bigger—respecting yourself more.

What do you want to be remembered for?

To develop yourself, you have to be doing the right work in the right kind of organization.

Where do I belong as a person?

Requires understanding what kind of work environment you need to do your best.

Big organization or small one

Working with people or working alone

Prosper in a situation of uncertainty or not

Need the pressure of deadlines to perform efficiently

Whether they make decisions quickly or need to sleep on them

First job is a lottery

The chances of being in the right place are not very good

Takes a few years to find out where you belong

Begin self-placement

Temperament and personality

Not subject to change by training

Don’t belong where you currently work

Why?

The right decision is to quit if

“Repotting” yourself

Sometimes a change—a big change or a small change—is essential in order to stimulate yourself again.

10-12 years with one organization is enough for many volunteers

Change in routine

When you stop learning (a touchstone) in a job, you begin to shrink.

The switch

Doesn’t have to be something far afield

Making several switches within the same area gives one experience working with a wide variety of different people in quite different work cultures

When you begin to fall into a pleasant routine, its time to force yourself to do something different.

“Burnout” often is just boredom

Perhaps all that is needed is a small shift

Accept a few invitations to visit others doing the same work and talk over problems

Take on a volunteer job with another organization

Maybe 3 hours per week

Even if already overworked

Need the extra—and different—stimulus to put different parts of yourself to work, both physically and mentally

The excitement is not the job—it is the result

Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the hills

If you allow the job to bore you, you have stopped working for results.

To build learning into your work, and keep it there, build in organized feedback from results to expectations.

From your own activities

Identify the key activities in your work—perhaps even in your life

When you engage in those activities, write down what you expect to happen

9-12 months later, compare your expectations to what actually happened

You will learn

From others people’s activities.

People in your own

What do they do well

How do they do it?

Try to do it yourself

Summary to this point. It’s up to you to:

Manage your job and your career.

To understand where you best belong

Make high demands on yourself by way of contribution to the work of the organization itself.

Practice what I call preventive hygiene so as not to allow your self to become bored.

Build in challenges

Doing the right things well

Effectiveness

Fully effective executives are rare

Effectiveness

Matter of habits of behavior

Few elementary rules

The rules of effectiveness are different in an organization from what they were in the one-man craft shop. In solo work, the job organizes the performer; in an organization, the performer organizes the job

Self-renewal

Work on your own self-renewal

Create the excitement, the challenge, the transformation that makes an old job enriching over and over again

See both yourself and the task in a new dimension can sometimes expand this capacity.

View your work from the audience’s viewpoint

Gives new meaning

Look for the unexpected success and run with it

Don’t brush the evidence aside by being problem-focused

Pay more attention to the things that were working exceptionally well.

Three most common forcing tools for sustaining the process of self-renewal

Teaching

Explain to a group of colleagues how they did something that worked very well, they learn, and so do the listeners

Going outside the organization

Doing volunteer work in another organization

Serving down in the ranks

Once or twice a year

Work at the level where service is delivered to the organization’s clients

Focus efforts to have the greatest ability for self-renewal.

What do you want to be remembered for?

Early exposure to the question will make all the difference, although you aren’t likely to really understand that until you are in your forties

At age 25, some began trying to answer it, foolishly

If you still can’t answer it by the time you’re fifty, you will have wasted your life

Keep asking the question over and over

Pushes you to see yourself as a different person—the person you can become

Non-profits: the second career — interview with Robert Buford (Leadership network & PFD Foundation for Non-Profit Management)

Learning required to make the transition from business to NPO

Reallocate sense of identity

From life of accumulation to one of service

Same values. But major change in proportions and behavior

Real sense of clarity about mission and goals and about what comes first

Who your master is

Update that understanding periodically

Do same things but to a different purpose and to a different drummer

Need self-knowledge

Need to be task focused rather than skill focused. Start on the outside

What is the purpose?

Who is the master?

Use the same tools—but you build a different edifice.

Experiences that helped you either to do the right things or avoid doing the wrong ones?

An outside interest

Avoid becoming a victim of own organization

Self-development

Stay in touch with your constituency

The woman executive in the non-profit institution — interview with Roxanne Spitzer-Lehmann (St. Joseph Health System)

Keeping track of progress

List major undertakings that I have to do

List things that are in process

To whom is have been delegated

What the status is

Differences between NPO & business

Bottom line oriented

A product to deliver

Cost-effectively

Consumers are satisfied

Have competition

Something better at the right price

Self-development

Developing others

My role

To facilitate their brainstorming and thinking

Then to pull it together into something that we all go out and implement

My job

Establish the goal and the vision

Give them the

Their job

Figure out how we can do it together

Summary: The action implications

Joshua Abrams

Start all over again

I don’t learn anything anymore

I’ve done all I can do

I’m still young enough so that I understand … and old enough to have experience with most of the things they are going through.

I’m no longer young enough…

Decide then act two years later

You are responsible for allocating your life. Nobody else will do it for you

Self development means two things & two quite different tasks: Developing the person. Developing the skill, competence, and ability to contribute.

The sequence in the book

Developing yourself begins by serving, by striving toward an idea outside of yourself.

Not by leading

To do this a person needs focus to do this

Start by developing your own strengths, adding skills and putting them to productive work

Doesn’t mean ignoring your weaknesses

Workmanship builds your own self-respect as it builds your own competence.

Next you work on the tasks to be done, the opportunities to be explored.

Start with the task, not with yourself

Achievement comes from matching

The two have to meet—

and the two have to match

Effective self-develop must proceed along two parallel streams. Improvement & Change

Improvement

Change

Both are essential

Listening for the signal that it is time to change is an essential skill for self-development.

Self-development becomes self-renewal when …

you walk a different path

become aware of a different horizon,

move toward a different destination

A time when outside help, a mentor can provide useful help

Means of self development are not obscure

Teaching is one of the most successful tools

An opportunity to help develop others

Keeping score on yourself

Self-development & self-renewal

Both are action

You become a bigger personser but a

You become more effective and committed person

Version 2

Developing the person

Developing yourself begins by serving, by striving toward an idea outside of yourself.

Means of self development are not obscure

Effective self-develop must proceed along two parallel streams. Improvement & Change

Self-development becomes self-renewal when

Self-development & self-renewal

Developing the skill, competence, and ability to contribute

Start by developing your own strengths, adding skills and putting them to productive work

Work on the tasks to be done, the opportunities to be explored.

Version 3

The tasks

The tasks 1) Developing the person & 2) Developing the skill, competence, and ability to contribute

Two parallel streams of effective self development

Self development becomes self-renewal

Walking a different path, becoming aware of a different horizon, move toward a different destination

Outside help, a mentor can provide useful help. One who knows what you are trying to do, who has often been doing similar things, is the one who can ask you: “Does it still make sense? Are you still getting the most out of yourself?”

The more achievement-minded and successful you are, the more likely you are to be immersed in the task at hand, immersed, above all, in the urgent.

Focusing effort

Viewing work form audience’s viewpoint

Looking for the unexpected success & running with it

Teaching

Volunteer work in another organization

Serving down in the ranks

Means of self development

Teaching

Does my situation provide an opportunity for teaching? Am I good at it?

Help develop others

Sit down with subordinates or associates in an honest effort to improve their performance and results understands what a potent tool the process is for self-development

Keeping score on yourself

What will you do tomorrow as a result of reading this book? And what will you stop doing?

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic”. — Peter Drucker The shift from manual workers who do as they are being told — either by the task or by the boss — to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves ↓ profoundly challenges social structure … “Managing Oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs.” … “It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers’ thoughts and actions from what most of us—even of the younger generation—still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.” … … “Managing Oneself is based on the very opposite realities: Workers are likely to outlive organizations (and therefore, employers can’t be depended on for designing your life), and the knowledge worker has mobility.” ← in a context     These pages are attention directing tools for navigating a world moving toward unimagined futures. It’s up to you to figure out what to harvest and calendarize — working something out in time (1915, 1940, 1970 … 2040 … the outer limit of your concern) — nobody is going to do it for you. It may be a step forward to actively reject something (rather than just passively ignoring) and then figure out a coping plan for what you’ve rejected. Your future is between your ears and our future is between our collective ears — it can’t be otherwise. A site exploration starting point   To create a rlaexp.com site search, go to Google’s site ↓ Type the following in their search box ↓ your search text site:rlaexp.com   What needs doing?