Leading by Design

MY MENTAL LIST OF CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS ABOUT TO GO UNDER was significantly lengthened this week.  Just yesterday a neighbor told me that a small environmental/ natural history research organization she works with was about to fold.  She was told that the board was casting around for a place to transfer the organization's collections of books, maps, photos and videos (although no one knows exactly where that will be despite the fact that they may have to shut their doors in a couple of weeks).   The day before that, a colleague called to say she was retiring from her organization and that there's a movement afoot to dissolve it (not her doing).  A third organization has burned through its endowment fund to the point where some board members think it's time to close the whole place down.   That's all in just the last week. I've been hearing for a long time that the pace of consolidations and dissolutions in the nonprofit sector would speed up as the ...

One of the building blocks of nonprofit life is connection to community. The community and its needs are what nonprofits serve; in turn, the community’s support is the lifeblood for the nonprofit’s work. We know that the most successful nonprofits build themselves around addressing unmet needs. They offer programs and services to individuals that ultimately make their communities livable and sustainable. Believing this, I’m always a little disappointed and frustrated when I meet up with organizations where the community (individually or collectively) is never addressed in mission statements or strategic plans, or consulted with in program development and evaluation, or used as a barometer of shifting trends or as a metric for success. This “dis-integration” from the public may have been the prevailing standard, particularly in the formation of cultural nonprofits, of another century, but it certainly holds no ground in the 21st. The two big questions every nonprofit must answer are...

In this video , former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy offers up her short list of “must do’s” for leaders in times of difficulty. She ought to know --- Mulcahy got the company back on firm ground after a failed leadership transition. Difficult times “test the caliber and character of leadership,” she says, adding that the organization’s reputation must be protected at all costs, because “it’s easy to lose; tough to restore.” Her leadership “must do’s” include: transparency consistency of message over time making sure your words and actions are aligned focus on mission and organizational fundamentals resiliency and believing success can be accomplished stepping up to the plate quickly when trouble arises – don’t sweep it under the rug Knowing she couldn’t turn Xerox around by herself, Mulcahy said she was “ruthless about asking for help.” And she got it. But she might not have been so fortunate had she not built and maintained her credibility from her “must do” list. Mulcahy’s advice works equa...

“Sustainable is a crappy vision; it’s a negative vision.” That was Peter Senge’s, author of The Fifth Discipline and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, message to participants at the Americans for the Arts gathering last month in Seattle. Why is sustainability a negative? It’s because, he says, when we hear sustainable, we hear “surviving.” If someone asked you how your marriage was going, you wouldn't proudly say it was sustainable, he pointed out. As a big-picture guy, he tried to get the audience of hundreds of arts administrators to shift out of economic crisis mode, and reconsider the arts (the act of creating, not the category The Arts) as a basic human activity. "The big evolution," claimed Senge, "is when the arts became The Arts, an abstraction. Abstraction leads to objectification and then marginalization. Art is a thing. A museum is a symbol of that." And the arts become marginalized becaus...

The Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project is monitoring in a systematic and timely way what is happening to nonprofit organizations in the Unites States. In a report released late last month, the majority of US nonprofits in the study report experiencing some level of fiscal stress. Except for arts organizations, the stress level of sizable majorities of organizations at present are “minimal” or “moderate”. However, 40% of US nonprofits are reporting this stress is “severe” or “very severe”. Particularly hard hit are theaters and orchestras (half to three-quarters of them are in this category) whose heavier reliance on donations saw the worst revenue losses. By contrast, only 29% of museums are reporting severe or very severe stress, putting them with educational institutions at the lower end of the stress spectrum. Museums continue to report strong general audience visitation, an indicator of their importance to the public in times of economic and emotional hardship. No...

An article in the May 11th issue of Crain's New York Business (" Made in New York ") explores why some manufacturing businesses are surviving despite the economy. It offers up five lessons, which I think have direct application for cultural nonprofits: 1. Be High-End As the article states, "If you want your company to last, you need a lasting reputation for quality." Cultural nonprofits strive for this -- many say so in their missions; it's time to take stock of your Quality Factor and take steps to burnish it or boost it starting at the front door. 2. Be Local "It pays to focus on the big, dense...market in your own backyard." Nurturing your local audience, however you might define that, returns dividends in the forms of membership retention, event attendance, and volunteerism, to name a few. Locals are here whether times are good or bad. 3. Be Networked "It's crucial to surviving recession," the article states. Think of your...

Two seemingly unrelated news items landed in my e-mailbox this month, each describing a decision by a cultural nonprofit to sell all or a portion of its assets. One is on the west coast; the other here in New York state. Both are the victims of their (and their communities’) inability to adequately steward what had been given to them for the benefit of others. These are not isolated events – indeed, we read about them every month and the pace is quickening as more nonprofits search for financial stability in a time when philanthropy seems stretched beyond capacity. Historic preservation colleague, Donna Ann Harris , sent me this Reuters article about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House going on the auction block: The 6,000-square-foot Los Angeles estate is being sold by the Ennis House Foundation, which recently completed the initial phase of a stabilization and restoration project after years of decay and damage from earthquakes and torrential rains. In March 2005, it was pl...

I come to a lot of new information and ideas late. And so it is with Dan Pallotta, the author of Uncharitable : How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential , a book that takes a hard look at how society constrains the work of nonprofits and how the people who work and volunteer for nonprofits constrain themselves. Pallotta's got an interesting story of his own -- I'll leave you to discover it -- that has undoubtedly refined his perspective. In any case, I find it refreshing, particularly now. He's also the author of the blog Free the Nonprofits and he's a keynote speaker at the October 2009 Arts Council of Indianapolis' Next Audiences Summit . Here's an excerpt from his May 11th blog post entitled Re-Thinking Charity : We have two rulebooks — one for charity, one for the rest of the economic world. We let the for-profit sector pay competitive wages based on value, but have a visceral reaction to anyone making a great deal of money in charity. We l...

My conversation with the director of a small museum was disheartening. The institution is staring at closure before year's end. The director continues to explore all possible options -- from fundraising to merger to closure -- but admits any option other than closure will take longer to accomplish than there is time on the clock. Most disheartening of all is the apparent inability of the board to pull together to raise some money. And, we're not talking millions, at least not for the short-run. Less than a couple hundred thousand would plug their operating shortfall for the rest of the year and buy them the time to nurture some of those longer-term options. On some levels, a sort of organizational paralysis seems to have set in. Not easy stuff. The current financial condition of this organization has been in the making for a dozen years. Some poor decisions were left to fester against hopes for a brighter tomorrow. Course corrections were too little and often too late to...

Without question, the common denominator among most -- if not all -- of the nonprofits I work with is that they carry a heavy load of organizational activities.  Staff, volunteers, money, and space are stretched to their limits.  The programmatic calendar is full.  The school buses are lined up at the door.   A public expectation has been created that must now be met again and again.   The load is getting heavier. Let's hope the bottom doesn't drop out.   Does this picture look familiar?  A common trait across the nonprofit sector is that institutions, particularly smaller ones, tend to take on a fair amount of work without first determining its costs and its benefits. The heavy load gets heavier and no one wants to dump any of it.  How do you choose?  Here's what I hear: 'Wouldn't someone be offended if a program, procedure or policy were suddenly jettisoned to make way for something new?' or 'We've been doing this activity so long that it defines us...

At your next board meeting look around you.   What would you say the average age of your board is?   Forty?   Fifty?   Sixty?    You’re not alone.   Almost three-quarters of nonprofit boards are comprised of Baby Boomers (those age 46-64), according to BoardSource's Nonprofit Governance Index survey.   Only 2 percent are younger than 30, with almost 30 percent between the ages of 30 and 49. In a recent Nonprofit Times article , Scott Leff of the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management says that attracting young men and women to board service is “fundamental to sustainability.”    Indeed, if an organization fails to do so, the board will age itself out putting its future in jeopardy.   And given the fact that the vast number of current board members will be retiring from board service in the next decade, the nonprofit sector is facing (some argue we're in it right now) a talent drain that, just in sheer numbers, will be difficult to replace. One of the big obstacles is that b...

Linda Norris' Uncataloged Museum blog post on transparency in museums is my impetus to knit together my recent post on measuring success with defining what those measures are. Linda points to the Indianapolis Museum of Art as the site of a great dashboard of measures that welcomes public scrutiny.   In fact, it appears that the museum's dashboard might be the only public museum dashboard -- and it's almost two-and-a-half years old!  The common denominator in all this is museum director Maxwell Anderson, who developed a lexicon of measures to assess organizational health in 2005 -- transparency has been the by-product. This isn't to say that museums and other cultural organizations haven't been tracking data for many years. It's the focus of the data and what's done with it that is different.  Let's talk about focus first.  The Indianapolis Museum of Art tracks activities in 13 broad areas of museum operations.  The resulting data is often quite tigh...