As strategic planning models became routine and accepted as a standard of practice, those who excelled in project management and repositioning content developed an a consultant industry of strategic planners who have emerged to bring expertise to “help” organizations create high impact plans. The secret that few consultants want to admit is that strategic planning is often reduced to a cookbook that illustrated with overused “fill-in-the blank” prescriptions that result in a unimaginative plans. Quite often, strategic planning is a simplistic reordering and renaming of existing strategy and approaches. Such a focus diminishes the value of strategic planning. This premise of the declining value of traditional strategic planning was identified over a decade ago in the seminal Harvard Business Review article titled, “The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning” by Henry Mintzberg. Mintzberg’s main criticism is that strategic planning often stymies strategy.
Performance improvement is a critical nonprofit management competency to master. The rapidly changing times demand that nonprofit organizations focus myopically on developing the highest level of organizational functioning and still reach higher…
I was cleaning my office the other day and came across a hand-sketched overhead transparency that I used as the basis for a keynote address to a conference of youth mentoring nonprofits that I delivered some seven or eight years ago. The conference theme was nonprofit sustainability and in the presentation I referenced five “Environmental Threats” facing nonprofit organizations. The list of threats predated the last economic earthquake (and ongoing aftershocks) and it scary to see how relevant and magnified these threats continue to be…
This blog is in response to a couple of emails I received in response to my last post about how useful the information was. One question I received was “Do you have a checklist that we could use to help us in our next board meeting?” You asked. I deliver. In this post I present “Ten Steps for Building an Effective Nonprofit Board: A Checklist for Action” This free 12-page PDF document is not designed to be an exhaustive guide to developing and staffing a board. Rather is a practice-based assessment tool
As the current political landscape continues to promise economic uncertainty and possibly even deep cuts to the social service infrastructure, nonprofits will need to adapt and change. For many nonprofits this ability to adapt and change will be directly correlated to the focus and strength of the agency’s board. Indeed I suggest that only an effective board is capable of designing and delivering strategic guidance that will be required to navigate the uncharted waters ahead. For any agency thinking about the future, these principles of effectiveness give a point of reference by which an agency can judge the strength and direction of its board.
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- Mark P Fulop, MA, MPH
PO Box 18144
Portland, OR 97218-0144
(503) 928-4082
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