Might as well face it…you’re addicted
Several years back, a funder introduced me to a group of her grantees as the “bad cop” in the tag team which was about to do a presentation, a persona that continues today.
Call me what you will, but I am on a crusade to help you help yourself, your organization, your group move forward so that you can maximize the delivery of your mission.
Earlier this week, I had a 45 minute, heartbreaking conversation. And despite that, I played the bad cop throughout. Telling the truth, Read more
January 20th, 2012 0 Comment Don’t Squelch Happiness
There’s a happy face on the cover of the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. Never, ever thought I’d see that! It’s the come-on for the issue’s theme: happiness. Here is HBR, in many people’s minds one of the premiere business journals, doing a whole on happiness in the workplace: what makes people happy on the job, how happy employees work better, how happiness can increase the odds of being successful, how happy employees make for more profits, and more.
The idea is such a Read more
January 13th, 2012 0 Comment We Can Do Better
Here’s a new year’s resolution that doesn’t show up on the routine list of working out more, spending less , being a better person. But it should be one of the ones that you don’t break—ever.
Everyone must adopt a code of ethics and live by it, no ifs, ands or buts. I’m almost embarrassed to be writing this, to be suggesting that people in the nonprofit sector don’t routinely operate from an ethical base. After all, we are supposed to be the “good guys,” the Read more
January 6th, 2012 0 Comment Looking to the Stars
This is going to sound all wrong, but would everyone and their mothers, brothers, aunts and uncles just stop fundraising? Please!
I just went to my browser and there was a message asking me to join a bunch of celebrities and “do good for the world this holiday season.” Seriously? My browser is now doing fundraising? It wants me to give money to celebrities’ causes merely because they are celebrities? How dumb does my browser think I am? (Or, how dumb is the vast majority of Read more
December 22nd, 2011 0 Comment Lessons from Bloomingdales
Every year I give each of my nephews and nieces a Christmas tree ornament, from the time they are born until they get married. My thinking was that I didn’t want the first Christmas tree of their own to be bare or have cheesy ornaments or lacking sentiment. When they were all young, it was easy, as “age appropriate” ornaments abounded. As they matured, I did the hand blown glass ornaments, the themed ornaments, the sentimental ornaments. But each year, it has gotten harder and Read more
December 15th, 2011 0 Comment Lessons from Bloomingdales
Every year I give each of my nephews and nieces a Christmas tree ornament, from the time they are born until they get married. My thinking was that I didn’t want the first Christmas tree of their own to be bare or have cheesy ornaments or lacking sentiment. When they were all young, it was easy, as “age appropriate” ornaments abounded. As they matured, I did the hand blown glass ornaments, the themed ornaments, the sentimental ornaments. But each year, it has gotten harder and Read more
What Feeds your soul?
I am sure that if you are fortunate, as I am, you have eaten your way through the recent Thanksgiving holiday and anxiously anticipating the holiday feasts still to come. Thus, I’m pretty certain that for most of you, your body is well fed.
But how’s your soul doing? This is a need which I hear repeatedly, mostly from people explaining to me why they have decided to leave the corporate world and join the nonprofit world. I heard it again in a recent story on Read more
December 9th, 2011 0 Comment Dumbing Down
A number of years ago, there was a scandal within the world of academia: it was said that some professors at some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning were dumbing down their grading systems. Apparently, a sizeable number of students, and parents, assumed that if you were smart enough to get into these esteemed academies, you were smart enough to receive nothing lower than a B. Thus, no matter the true quality of your work, if you took a class with those professors Read more
December 2nd, 2011 0 Comment Start with Why
I have frequently written over the years about the importance of understanding that for-profit practices are not inherently wise and good simply because they are part of the vaunted for-profit sector, and, alternatively, nonprofit practices are not inherently inferior.
Each sector has some of the right answers and/or best practices that could work equally well in the other. We must stop automatically praising one and denigrating the other. It is not, after all, a competition. Each sector contributes to making our communities and our lives better. Read more
I Dare You
The rule “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is, fortunately, defunct. At least in the military. I think, however, it is alive and well in the culture of too many nonprofit boards: if we don’t ask, we don’t know; if we don’t know, we can think everything is still great; if we think everything is still great, we don’t have to do anything.” And so it goes.
This practice was the subtext running through my mind as I looked at the results of our survey checking in on Read more
