Why are borders still so important to us?

A Business Week article from a few years ago recently resurfaced in a discussion humanitarian planning, and it made me think about why we still have the concepts of ‘headquarters’ and ‘field’ offices long after leading transnational companies have abandonned these in favor of truly distributed leadership with executive level folks spread out around the world to leverage proximity to clients, lower costs, talent availability and time zone responsiveness.

Take a look at the article here, and let me know what you think - why don’t NGOs have more of their senior leadership in the countries where they work?

Strategic Planning - does it really make us more strategic?

As someone who is fully immersed in my agency’s annual strategic and budgeting process right now, I am fascinated in reading thought provoking articles on the issue. This thought piece by Becky Andrews entitled Why Strategic Planning isn’t Strategic struck me as a good, concise account of where we go wrong in our planning processes. I have listed out her key arguments below but it is worth reading the full article (it’s only 2 pages). My frustration lies in the fact that she states the problems clearly but doesn’t give much of a hint as to what the alternatives are (unlike the piece on budgeting that we posted last week). If anyone has any suggestions on things that have worked for them, please post them here.

What goes wrong when we try to plan strategically:

1. We mistake goals for strategy
2. We generate more goals than we can reasonably pursure (this sounds familiar!)
3. We expect strategies to fit within a rigid timeframe
4. We confuse strategic planning with consensus building
5. We try to forecast the future from a snapshot in time
6. We pretend to be objective (she has a funny analysis of how we kid ourselves in SWOT analyses)
7. Staff get frustrated through bad data and/or inaction
8. There is a tendency to overrely on bad data
9. Time delays put the organization on hold
10. The whole process wears us down

Measuring Your Mission - Is it Possible?

Any of us interested in the complexities, challenges and successes of macro-level measurement that tells us at an agency level whether we are making progress (or not) towards achieving our mission, should check out The Bridgespan Group. This non-profit consulting group helps agencies get closer to results measurement in a number of different ways. Although their focus is US domestic agencies, the papers that they have published are relevant to those of us in the international humanitarian field. In particular I liked a study entitled Great Valley Center: A Case Study in Measuring for Mission that talks about how they helped the Great Valley Center start to measure it’s results at the macro level. Interestingly, a recent study by the Independent Sector identified that nearly 60% of the nonprofits surveyed said that the results of at least some of their programs were too intangible to measure. Now that sounds familiar!!! Even if you aren’t interested in the specifics of the case, the generic challenges and potential solutions outlined are (I think) applicable to all of us.

Why budgeting fails, and what we can do about it.

Our own Tori Gilbert summarizes Harvard Business School’s paper by By Prof. Peter Horvath and Dr. Ralf Sauter.

“Summary:

The traditional budgeting process is counterproductive. It is inefficient, rapidly becomes obsolete, doesn’t motivate the right behaviors and is out of sync with strategy. Traditional budgeting is especially not suited to the realities of dynamic markets, making it difficult to implement budget adjustments called for throughout the year.

To be most useful in a dynamic marketplace, budgeting must integrate with and support strategy. The authors propose six guiding principles for an advanced budgeting system that optimizes the roles of budgeting while supporting strategy execution:

1. Align budgeting to strategy.
2. Link relevant nonfinancial performance measures to budgeting.
3. Reduce detail through the use of aggregated budgets.
4. Use rolling budgets instead of fixed budgets—a continual planning process, frequently updated and adaptable to changing conditions.
5. Use relative targets instead of fixed budgets to reward people–measuring success by comparing performance against relative, self-adjusting performance measures. Relative targets can motivate the right behavior, guiding people to act in an organization’s best interest.
6. Increase the focus on cross-functional core processes instead of departmental and organizational unit performance. This leads managers to be more attentive to organizational strategy and goals, and fosters collective effort and teamwork instead of internal competition for resources.

The Balanced Scorecard (see links below) is described as a helpful alignment mechanism. The Balanced Scorecard can supply the coordinating functions for budgets by communicating strategy to managers and give them direction; it can help managers oversee strategic initiatives and link them to financial activities. The BSC’s clear depiction of strategic priorities helps to set firm guidelines for budget planning. When implementing the BSC, it is crucial to de-emphasize the importance of budget-related objectives to the benefit of BSC-related objectives, while reducing the level of detail in the budget—otherwise you’ll only double the work and increase the frustration level.”

Read the article here.

Read the Wikipedia article on the Balanced Scorecard approach here.

Multi-tasking: is it making us less productive?

“Multitasking, a definition: ‘The attempt by human beings to operate like computers, often done with the assistance of computers’ “.

Most of the reports I have read about multi-tasking recently focus on asserting that it is something that women are more likely to be good at than men. This article  in the Atlantic is a rant against multi-tasking in any form. It is a highly personal account by Walter Kirn of his own struggles with it, backed by interesting quotations and scientific facts.

What makes nonprofits successful?

The book Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits feels like the nonprofit equivalent of From Good to Great by Jim Collins that has so influenced the private sector in recent years.

For those of you who don’t have the time to read the book, Fast Company’s review provides a succinct summary of the six key findings that Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant discovered as they studied the 12 most successful nonprofits over a three-year time period.

In brief (but the article is worth reading as it fleshes the six points out a little more), successful nonprofits:

1. Don’t just implement great programs, they connect it with advocacy.

2. Connect in with market forces (don’t just rely on trying to ignite altruism!).

3. Engage others outside the agency to be passionate champions of their work.

4. Work collaboratively through networks with other nonprofits.

5. Learn to adapt (this seems the most obvious of the findings to me!)

6. Ensure that leadership doesn’t just reside with one person in the agency.

It is interesting to look at where (and where not) the intersection exists with this and the Good to Great approach. The book makes reference to the fact that management structures did not appear to be a critical success factor for these 12 NGOs. Also something which feels a little counter intuitive.