Join people in over 70 countries
worldwide who read The
Mission-Based Management Newsletter. It's free
and easy to subscribe:
TO SUBSCRIBE: Simply
send an email to subscribe@missionbased.com.
You will be added to our mailing list and begin receiving your own copy with the next issue.
Anti-spam promise:
Your email address will not be sold, lent, or
passed on to any other person or organization. In addition, I don't use
Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express for my mail server, so if
a worm ever gets into my computers, it won't steal your address!
TO UNSUBSCRIBE: If you
no longer wish to receive this newsletter, send an email to: unsubscribe@missionbased.com
and you will be promptly removed from the mailing list.
The NEW 3rd Edition of Mission-Based Management is available!
I'm delighted to announce that the new 3rd Edition of Mission-Based Management; Leading Your Nonprofit in the 21st Century has been released by John Wiley & Sons. The 3rd Edition
is a major revision, with an updated list of key characteristics of
nonprofit success, a new chapter on Ethics, Accountability and
Transparency, and a nearly complete rewrite of the chapter on
technology. In tough times, reviewing best management practices
is essential. This new edition will help you and your organization do
just that.
You can learn more about the new edition here. Check it out!
Here, I provide you with my
recommendations on the materials available that can help you
become more mission-capable in the area of Nonprofit Innovation
In March,we'll finish out our two part examination of: Nonprofit Innovation.
Past Issues:
You can see the topics of past Mission-Based
Management Newsletters, and then view those that are of
interest to you, by scrolling to the bottom of the newsletter, or by clicking here.
Nonprofit Innovation Over the past
fourteen months, I've been working with a great group of people on a
terrific subject: how to increase the amount and quality of nonprofit
innovation. This issue and next, we'll discuss some of the basis of our
work, and show you some preliminary take-aways that you can use right
away.
It's been long said that all the easy problems have been solved--the
hard ones remain. I agree, and would add that in most parts of our
culture those hard ones have been left to nonprofits. So, with too few
resources, overworked staff, and boards who are often, these days,
understandably conservative in developing new approaches to problems,
how should nonprofits get a handle on innovating more and better. Let's
look at a couple of realities.
First, innovation is not always about the big innovation--the invention
of the lightbulb or the concept of crop rotation. It happens in little
ways every day in our lives. We figure out a better way to commute, a
new way to load the dishwasher, a new playlist on our iPod. If you
picture innovation on a bell curve, the little every day innovations
are on one tail, the big, E=MC2 innovations on the other. In between
are the kind of innovations we need to do our missions better. So,
while we all think we should innovate more, in fact, we already do, and
we should not limit the use of the term innovation to just big,
game-changing ideas.
Second, as nonprofit leaders, we can't come up with all the ideas.
First, we're often too close to the issue to see it clearly, second,
we're often too far away from the provision of mission to know what's
going on and, finally, we only have 24 hours a day. Even though we
burden ourselves with the notion that we have to be brilliant and solve
every problem that our organization faces, we can't. The sooner we give
that up, the better. Once we do that, we admit we need help. Then comes
the big question--where is that help? Is it in our management team, our
board, or beyond? Our work over the past fourteen months clearly
indicates the latter-it's everywhere.
Here is the key: Put more neurons on the problem.
Ask widely (including people from outside your discipline),ask often,
get input and ideas, iterate on those ideas and then go back and ask
again, and again, and again. That's takeaway number one.
The other key attitude to make innovation part of your culture is this one, with apologies to John Chambers of Cisco:Every idea is a good idea until we come up with the best idea. And, the best idea does not have to be my idea. This
philosophy goes hand in hand with the concept of asking, iterating and
giving up the management mistake of believing that only senior managers
can solve problems.
Next issue we'll cover some tools you can use immediately to put these ideas into use.
If
you found this hint helpful, there are lots more management, marketing,
and technology ideas for you in the "Ideas" section at www.missionbased.com.
Check them out--they're free.
Nonprofit Innovation....and
Technology!
Tech allows you to be getting input all the time: 24/7/365. So, if we
want to ask more people from more disciplines, how do we do it? First,
by making what we currently do and plan to do totally transparent.
Thus, your strategic plans, and outcomes should be online in easy to
access fashion.
Second, some people don't wait to be asked--they have ideas (and
complaints) outside of a structured asking cycle. So, have places on
your website (and within your management structure) so that people can
suggest improvements at any time. Blogs, comment pages, social network
sites can all do this, but not by themselves. Someone has to monitor
and respond quickly to ideas and comments.
One four-year-old story that illustrates this: A friend of mine is CEO
of a large Fortune 500 company. Before Google Alerts (which now does
his search for him), my friend started each day by Googling the
following "(his company name) sucks" and seeing what popped up. Since
his firm impacted perhaps 30,000-50,000 customers a day, the search
often resulted in a number of new complaints. My friend made it his job
to make sure each complainer was responded to before the close of
business that day....and he often told me of the great outcomes these
complaints had--they were taken to heart by the company as an
opporunity to improve, rather than an issue to be swept under the
carpet.
More on tech and innovation next month.
If
you found this hint helpful, there are lots more management, marketing,
and technology ideas for you in the "Ideas" section at www.missionbased.com.
Check them out--they're free
Below
you'll see the date, location, and
topics of public
training I'm
currently scheduled to do in the next few months. For more information
on a particular speaking engagement, get in touch with the contact
person listed in the right hand column, or email me.
For
more information on my availability
throughout the next 12-18 months, available topics, sample agendas, and
fees go to www.missionbased.com/training.htm
There is a direct correllation between better front-end innovation
(where you get the ideas) and marketing. It's those three little
letters you see me discuss so often in this space. A.S.K. As I said
above, the more neurons on the problem the better--so you need to be
asking more people. As I noted in the Technology Tip, tech is ready and able to help, but first, the marketing side of you has to identify who to ask, and how to ask them.
Who should you ask--while the normal asking would include the board,
the management team and some staff, my mantra of more neurons clearly
includes people who don't know much about what you do. A recent article
in "Wired" talked about what to do when things don't go as planned, in
other words innovating around speed bumps. One of their suggestions was
to "Ask the Ignorant". The term ignorant did not mean someone
uneducated, just someone who is not an expert in your field, or who
knows your jargon. By having to explain the issue in simple terms, you
often come to an epiphany yourself, and the outsider can make
suggestions from a perspective you don't have.
This kind of asking is a great use of focus groups. Getting people
together who are not experts but who do care about what you do
would be most efficient in such a group. You can't really design a
survey to ask these kinds of questions, so consider one starting place
one or more focus groups.
If
you found this hint helpful, there are
lots more management, marketing, and technology ideas for you in the
"Ideas" section at www.missionbased.com.
Check them out--they're free.
