Leading by Design

My last post focused on merger as an organizational growth option, not a last-ditch attempt to survive.  Sadly, it's often not considered an option until too late.  But it, along with its cousins collaboration and partnership, ought to be in every nonprofit leader's lexicon.  How does it make it into the ongoing conversation?  Here are a couple of thoughts: Every year, as an organization is evaluating or updating its strategic plan, part of the conversation should focus on where the organization is in terms of its "life cycle" and what its options are for continued health.  I think this kind of discussion goes hand-in-hand with planning, but it could be a stand-alone conversation, as well.  It may be a conversation that begins at the staff level, but at some point it must migrate to the board level.  Institutionalizing such a conversation is one way to enable people to become comfortable with the fluctuating-- and sometimes inscrutable -- dynamic that is the nonprofi...

Just like the daffodils in my garden this spring, a few stories about nonprofit mergers can be found offering bright respites from the reams of gloomy headlines about cultural nonprofits in trouble.   The Boston Globe's April 15th story about the successful merger of two social welfare organizations made the point that the notion of merger seems to be a relatively new concept in the nonprofit world.  From my vantage point, merger is generally not an option to be found in the toolkit of most cultural nonprofit leaders.  As the Globe article rightly points out, mergers tend to be seen as a sign of failure; nonprofit leaders worry that mergers mean loss of autonomy or identity.  Indeed, one Globe reader summed up the distaste many have for merger, " Social service agencies can more typically be combined without anything essential being lost; arts institutions exist to fulfill a certain artistic vision, and combining two similar size groups usually means one vision endures and th...