The Opposite of Vulnerable
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I’ve been thinking a lot about vulnerability—the vulnerability of individuals, of organizations, of communities, of societies. No surprise, I guess, given the current state of the economy.
And then this morning, two staff of The Nonprofit Center walked into the office to find Read more
April 23rd, 2009 0 Comment A Dog Eat Dog World
As much as it pains me to admit this, there have been times in my life when I found it just didn’t pay to read a newspaper (add, in today’s world, use any means to keep abreast of the world affairs). Today might just have to be the start of one of those periods.
Did something major happen today? No, I just started doing a little catch-up reading at lunch, and my reading started and ended with the March 12 Read more
April 17th, 2009 0 Comment Separate the Wheat from the Chaff
So, the question gets asked of some presidential economic advisor in some NPR interview (and, I’m sure, is repeated in many other interview settings), is $1 trillion going to take care of getting rid of all of the “toxic assets” banks are currently holding? The response, in summary: well, minimally, it should go a long a way.
We are talking about sums of money that the vast, vast majority of nonprofits, let alone their clients, can’t even fathom. It is a sum of money that Read more
April 9th, 2009 2 Comments Strategery
Strategy, strategy, strategy. If ever there were a word that should guide us now, it’s strategy And yet, too many nonprofits don’t “get” strategy. They don’t like strategy. They somehow think it is a dirty word, and not of benefit to them. And thus they continue to go about their business reacting. They react to financial difficulties by reflexively cutting budgets. No strategy is involved, no thought to core competencies, protecting the ability to fulfill Read more
March 26th, 2009 0 Comment Are You Special Ops?
The cover story of the February 23 issue of Newsweek was all about stress—the pluses (yes, apparently there are some benefits that can be had from stress), the minuses; who handles stress really well (special ops!), and who not so well, and so forth. Actually, a bit more than I really wanted to know about stress as I tried to figure out whether I was in the special ops group or not. While all the time, yes, you got it, Read more
March 20th, 2009 0 Comment Da Vinci Was An Engineer Too
I am desperately trying to find something positive to blog about, but I fear I cannot. So, maybe this could be perceived as a mixed message.
The Conference Board recently surveyed corporations to understand the current thinking on corporate giving. So, the predictable bad news: 45 percent of the 189 companies that responded said they’d already reduced their corporate giving budgets for 2009 and another 16 percent anticipated doing so. But the not so bad news: that leaves another 40 percent that Read more
March 13th, 2009 0 Comment 1.5 Million is Enough
Bad enough that I had to learn this morning of another nonprofit board that thinks it can do away with its executive director, thereby saving money, and just let board members run the organization. (That was last week’s rant, I mean blog.) Boards can’t do their own job! What makes them think they can do fulfill both the management and governance functions at once and still do well by the organization?
But now I have to see organizations and individuals all over the country Read more
March 6th, 2009 0 Comment Nickel & Diming Nonprofits
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Dateline Vermont: if you work at a nonprofit that receives more than 50% of its funding from the state and you earn more than $60,000, there is a bill pending that would require you to take a 5% salary reduction. (This money would Read more
February 27th, 2009 2 Comments Heads in the Sand (Again)
Last week, we sent out an e-mail blast with the subject line: Does your board want to be the best? While we always receive responses, there was an immediate one that was unique in both content and brevity. It read, simply: “No!”
After I stopped laughing, my concern kicked in: I stopped and thought: oh, maybe the writer was being serious. Maybe he, let me call him Bob, and the board had zero interest in doing things right. As opposed to how I Read more
February 20th, 2009 0 Comment Why Can’t They Be More Like Us?
Earlier this week local public radio’s Radio Times featured a columnist from the Philadelphia Business Journal and an editor and senior writer for Business Week. The topic was the value, potency, impact, etc., of President Obama’s mandate of a cap on the compensation of senior executives at companies receiving federal bail out money.
It took the first comment of one of the guests to have me fuming. He was discussing how executive compensation consultants are already advising people on how to get Read more
February 13th, 2009 0 Comment 