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
Living Philanthropically
Recently, I pulled out an old tried and true “ice breaker” for a group with which I was working. I am not a big fan of ice breakers, as I am a very private person and not the touchy-feely type. I don’t want to pull something personal out of my bag and tell you its significance or tell you three things that no one in the room—a room full of either total strangers or vague acquaintances—knows about me, or play some cute game, etc. You Read more
Handwriting on the Wall
It is time that nonprofits lost their sense of entitlement. Listen up: you aren’t owed anything just because you are a nonprofit.
Sense of entitlement you are asking? How’s that work? Let me count the ways!
Frequently, I will hear expressions of anger when a nonprofit doesn’t get the funding it had sought. The anger isn’t at the organization, perhaps for writing a poor proposal or not following funding guidelines or having that prerequisite meeting with the program officer. Rather, the anger is towards the funder with Read more
Life at the Bottom
Does the nonprofit sector have a mind of its own; or a backbone? Consider the 9/22/11 issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. This issue was consumed with exposing—and it did feel like a tabloid expose–the data on high salaries for nonprofit leaders.
In so doing, it helped do the homework for those attorneys general around the country who want to “do something about exorbitant salaries” for nonprofit executive directors. In so doing, it pandered to the concerns of these attorneys general, the media and the donors Read more
How many is enough?
Recently, I’ve felt a lot like I am watching a great tennis match, say one between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal: he’s up, he’s down; he slammed it, he lobbed it. Except the “he” is nonprofits and the up and down, slammed and lobbed are coming and going: that nonprofit is closing its doors, this nonprofit is expanding to Philadelphia. Unlike a tennis match, though, I’m not sure there are always winners.
On top of that, a few weeks ago, I got into a very public, Read more
