Leading by Design

NOBODY CREATED A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION FROM A SMALL IDEA, PERIOD.  Just think about it:  what museum, artists' cooperative, hospital, school or community garden didn't begin with someone saying "what if?"....and then taking action.  Founders dream dreams and work tirelessly to make them reality.  Those of us who come after founders have dreams, too.  We work tirelessly to take our organizations to the next level by continually trying to raise the impact bar. Big ideas are critical fuel for the nonprofit engine.  They ignite imaginations, attract people (both as workers and as audiences), connect otherwise free-floating dots, and when they fully advance mission impact, they open pocketbooks.  Yet, why is it that many organizations continue to focus on the narrow, the small bore, their finite piece of nonprofit real estate?  Why do so many organizations continue to silo their staff and volunteers, thus removing the spontaneous opportunities ...

THIS PARAGRAPH FROM A RECENT post by Dan Pallotta (his blog is Free the Nonprofits ) has my head spinning. So, I’m just going to lay it all out there as best I can. Pallotta uses the Apollo space program as an example of a success because it had specific parameters – and resources – for achievement. He doesn’t see either in the current nonprofit sector. Nearly 100 new nonprofits are created in the U.S. every day — about 35,000 a year — most of them doing the same things as existing organizations wrestling with the same social problems. Over 90% are very small — with less than half a million dollars in annual revenues. In his recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review , Mark Kramer wrote that, because of fragmentation, redundancy, and the plethora of small organizations "there is little reason to assume that [nonprofits] have the ability to solve society's large-scale problems." I would argue that it is precisely because we aren't committing o...