Management expert Jim Collins, the author of the New York Times bestseller Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, spoke recently with Contribute editor Marcia Stepanek about his thoughts on what he calls the "social sector." A couple of years back Collins wrote a 36-page monograph applying the topics in his book to the nonprofit and government sectors, and in chatting with Stepanek he began with a very striking statement:
We have to reject the idea, well intentioned but dead wrong, that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is simply to become more like a business. The truth is that most businesses aren’t great, and so we can’t learn about greatness by just looking at what the average business does. Most businesses are just average by definition.
Collins went on to identify the one factor that separates good organizations from great ones:
Discipline — the discipline to demand results, the discipline to hold ourselves to sustained outcomes, the discipline to understand what are the inputs to produce the outputs, the discipline to build for the long term and to not succumb to expedient opportunity, the discipline to hold growth back to only what we can do better than anyone else in the world, the discipline to only put people in positions who are the right people for those positions—even if we feel pressure to do otherwise. These are the disciplines of greatness that most businesses, most nonprofits, most sports teams, most of anything lack.
And he concluded with an observation that will surely have countless nonprofit executives nodding their heads in rigorous agreement:
There is, though, one critical thing to worry about, and that’s restricted funding. I understand why people have it. I understand why people want it. I would just suggest that it is contrary to what builds great organizations. Great organizations — not great programs — will make us, over time, a great society. | 501(c)
Tags: Jim Collins, Good to Great
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