Posts Tagged ‘strategy’
Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 7, 2011 in Strategic Thinking
Flying on US Airways in 1997, I was reading the inflight magazine Attache, (remember those? inflight magazines?) when I stumbled on an article “Genius at work – How to Solve Almost Anything.” In it were 9 tips by inventor Stanley Mason, the holder of over 60 patents, including the peel open packaging of Band Aids, pinless disposable diapers and squeezable ketchup bottles. 
Cleaning out my files the other day, I stumbled on those tips and realized just how influential they have been to my work in strategic planning.
Here’s what Mason shared in the article:
- Know exactly what you want to solve
- Research deeply
- Call in help
- Practice problem-solving
- Sketch it out
- Churn
- Go see a movie
- Keep your space clear
- Know when to walk away
In an interview for the book Diamond Power: Gems of Wisdom from America’s Greatest Marketers, Mason says
“It’s really not that complicated. The creative process is trying really hard to solve a problem.”
Isn’t that the essence of strategic planning?
While our missions aren’t necessarily problems, the goal of getting from where we are today to realizing our mission can be seen as a big puzzle Read More >>
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Posted by Jon Howard on April 20, 2011 in Fundraising, Nonprofit Highlights, Public engagement
Captain Ahab set out from New Bedford, Massachusetts, with just one idea: putting his harpoon in the ultimate big fish, Moby Dick. His all or nothing approach didn’t work out so well for anyone but the whale.
The Buzzards Bay Coalition got much better results by spreading nets in many different waters when they set out on their own New Bedford-based quest: to grow membership by more than 50 percent over two years. The Coalition started the campaign in 2009 with 5,200 members. A generous donor offered them $500,000 if they could add 3,000 new members before December 31, 2010.
“He wasn’t kidding,” said Mark Rasmussen, the Coalition’s Executive Director of his anonymous donor. “He made it clear: if we missed the target, we wouldn’t get the money.” Last week, my colleague Anne Garnett and I sat down with Mark just a few blocks away from the Seaman’s Bethel and other opening scenes of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to find out how the Coalition met the challenge, won the prize and set a new direction for its future. Here are some lessons:
- Share the drama. “It’s wonderful – and frankly a bit scary – to have a challenge like this,” said Mark in his 2009 announcement. The compelling $500,000 challenge and the possibility of failure helped excite and engage the Coalition family and the general public.
- All hands on deck. Volunteers moved mountainst to get targeted mailings out the door, saving thousands of dollars. Board members stepped up, ransacking their Rolodexes and buying gift memberships. That commitment brought other friends and members in on the project.
- Know what you are counting. The goal was member numbers, not member dollars. The Coalition already had clear criteria for counting individual members (family memberships count as two members) so everyone, including the challenge donor, knew the score.
- Make it easy. Any donor of $10 or more ($30 for families) who opts to be a member is a member. That low price point made it easy to say “yes.”
- Try everything. Mark handed us a pie chart with 12 slices breaking out where the members came from. Their traditional Bay swim and newer Bay bike ride accounted for 42 percent of the new members. The rest were spread over 11 separate member recruitment projects.
- Recruit the friends of your friends. As noted, the Coalition got the biggest boost just by offering a member option to riders, swimmers and their sponsors. Mark has been pleasantly surprised to find event sponsors responding well to direct renewal requests this year.
- Go grassroots. Who loves the Bay? Boaters and shellfishers for sure. Volunteers moved mountains to merge and purge records from 18 coastal communities. Personalized mailings to these two groups of public permit-holders snagged 13 percent of the total new member catch.
- Let people help. The owner of Not Your Average Joe’s restaurant created an entire promotional effort on his own, including hats, table cards and personal appeals from servers as well as mini-matching gifts of $5, to encourage diners to add membership dues to their dinner check. That brought in an astounding 550 members in just five weeks.
The Not Your Average Joe’s campaign added to a late surge that put the campaign way over the top in the later months of 2010. The Coalition wound up adding about 3,600 new members by the deadline, blowing the doors off their goal. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on February 16, 2011 in Strategic Thinking
- Intent focused
- A systems perspective
- Thinking in Time
- Intelligent Opportunism
- Hypothesis-driven
These are the five elements that make up strategic thinking as described by Dr. Jeanne M. Liedtka, a faculty member at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business and former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation.
I’ve never met Dr. Liedtka, but I’m madly in love with her elements of strategic thinking.
One of the frustrations I’ve had with most of the definitions of strategic planning is that rarely is the concept “strategic” or “strategic thinking” well-defined. (I feel the same way about the use of the term “policies” which is why I’m drawn to the framework for policy creation as espoused by policygovernance guru John Carver)
In many definitions, strategic planning is defined as a process that employs “strategic thinking” or “strategies.” I guess the definers believe everyone inherently knows strategy when they see it. If only that were so.
I learned a great word in school many years ago: “tautology.” No it’s not a fish (that’s tautog).
A tautology is an explanation that uses the same or similar terms to explain what it means, like calling strategic planning a planning process that creates strategies.
Apparently Dr. Liedtka was also frustrated by these definitions, so she wrote an article* to explain what it meant to think strategically.
So what are these five essential elements of strategic thinking that she identified?
1. Intent focused
Dr. Liedtka says: “Strategic intent provides the focus that allows individuals within an organization to marshal and leverage their energy, to focus attention, to resist distraction, and to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal.”
This concept implies both having an overarching goal or direction (you might call that your vision) Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on April 13, 2009 in 100 Things We've Learned, Big ideas, Effectiveness, Great quotes, Strategic Thinking
“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” Warren Buffet’s quote in Wired Magazine on the formula that led to the downfall of Wall Street was aptly quoted by Phil Buchanan, the Executive Director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy in an exchange on the Tactical Philanthropy blog.
This reminds me of a quote in Boards that Make A Difference by governance guru John Carver that has always stuck in my head. “A crude measure of the right thing beats a precise measure of the wrong thing.”
All this was stirred up for me by the recent buzz within the world of philanthropy for measures to better direct donor giving to “what works.”
There is a real danger in oversimplifying what works.
While I’m completely in favor of focusing the attention of our sector toward processes that produce real community results, I’m wary of reliance on simplistic nonprofit rating systems (e.g. GiveWell) that attempt to duplicate for mission effectiveness the same style of rating formulas that Charity Navigator and others use to rank nonprofits by their financial metrics. We already know that judging a nonprofit solely upon the percentage of program expenses tells us nothing about community results and, in many cases, not even a terribly lot about nonprofit financial effectiveness.
How can we better use the indicators that do exist to influence whole systems change and not just randomized philanthropic endeavors? Read More >>
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