[Lnc-business] Peter Drucker's Book - Part One

[Scott L.]

At our New Orleans LNC Session last December, the Chair kindly gave every
LNC member a copy of Peter Drucker's book  "Managing the Nonprofit
Corporation."  I finished the book around Christmas time, and while I was
reading it I made a list of interesting citations.  

 

Here is Part One of those citations:

 

 

Page 5   "One of our most common mistakes is to make the mission statement
into a kind of hero sandwich of good intentions.  It has to be simple and
clear.  As you add new tasks, you deemphasize and get rid of old ones.  You
can only do so many things.  Look at what we are trying to do in our
colleges.  The mission statement is confused - we are trying to do 50
different things.  It won't work, and that's why the fundamentalist colleges
attract so many young people.  Their mission is very narrow.  You and I may
quarrel with it and say it's too narrow, but it's clear.  It enables the
students to understand.  And it also enables the faculty to know.  And it
enables that administration to say, we aren't going to teach accounting."

 

 

             Contrast that with the 6 different "missions" in the Purposes
section of our Bylaws.

 

 

 

 

Page 71 "You can see some great achievements where people labored in the
wilderness for 25 years.  But they are very rare.  Most of the people who
persist in the wilderness leave nothing behind but bleached bones.  There
are also true believers who are dedicated to a cause where success, failure,
and results are irrelevant, and we need such people.  They are our
conscience.  But very few of them achieve.  Maybe their rewards are in
Heaven.  But that's not sure, either.  "There is no joy in Heaven over empty
churches", St. Augustine wrote 1600 years ago to one of his monks who busily
built churches all over the desert.  So, if you have no results, try a 2nd
time.  Then look at it carefully and move on to something else."

 

        That directly corresponds with what Nathaniel Branden said about
Libertarians who want the Libertarian Party to fail so that they can
continue to be big fish in a small pond.

 

 

 

 

Page 84  "Marketing in a non-profit organization becomes effective when the
organization is very clear about what it wants to accomplish, has motivated
everyone in the organization to agree to that goal and to see the
worthwhileness of that goal, and when the organization has taken the steps
to implement this vision in a way which is cost-effective, in a way which
brings about that result."

 

 

 

 

Page 92 "I would say that organizations running annual campaigns without
asking for specific gifts could, with the same effort, probably increase
their income by as much as 25% by asking for a specific gift."

 

In other words - don't just give donors a laundry list of amounts - use
their giving history to ask for one specific amount.

 

 

 

 

 

Page 100  "Traditionally, businesses have researched their own customers and
know, or try to know, as much as possible about them.  But even if you have
market leadership, non-customers always outnumber customers.  The most
important knowledge is the potential customer.  The customer who really
needs the service, wants the service, but not in the way it is currently
available today."

 

 

     I am sure you will all agree that LP projects are almost always
designed to keep our current members happy.  Millions of libertarians in
this country  desperately want and need a successful third political party,
but we refuse to give it to them because we are too concerned with keeping
tiny, but vocal segments of our membership happy (video conference special
meetings, sending this e-mail list to the RNC and the DNC, etc).

 

 

 

Page 108  "Equally dangerous is the opposite - to go for the easy results
rather than for results that further the mission.  Avoid overemphasis on the
things the institution can easily get money for, the popular issues, the
easy things.  Universities, for instance, often are under great pressure to
accept money for a chair that administration and faculty feel actually
detracts from the school's mission (we call them "Mickey Mouse chairs)."

 

 

A great example of this is the 1/12 of a building that the previous LNC
authorized for the Immediate-Past-Chair to purchase.  Because of poor
financial management on the part of the Immediate-Past-Chair, the down
payment cannibalized the general fund by such a large amount that the ED was
forced to fire our receptionist.  Think of that - the supposed "third
largest political party" in the United States was so recklessly managed that
it could not even afford to retain a dedicated live person to answer the
phone and welcome visitors.  I don't blame the current ED for this - he has
to follow the orders of the Chair.

 

If you think I am being too harsh, look at the reserve fund charts over the
past 5 years.  

 

 

 

Page 110  "The first - but also the toughest - task for the non-profit
executive is to get all of these constituencies to agree on what the
long-term goals of the institution are.  Building around the long term is
the only way to integrate all these interests."

 

 

 

Page 112   "To believe that whatever we do is a moral cause, and should be
pursued whether there are results or not, is a perennial temptation for 

non-profit executives - and even more for their boards.  But even if the
cause itself is a moral cause, the specific way it is pursued better have
results.  There are always so many more moral causes to be served than we
have resources for that the non-profit institution has a duty - towards its
donors, toward its customers, and toward its own staff - to allocate its
scarce resources for results rather than to squander them on being
righteous."

 

 

If this board continues to spend huge amounts of time and effort debating
peripheral issues like videoconferences and purchasing monuments, we will
continue to lose members and donors to organizations that actually get
results in the real world.

 

 

    Scott Lieberman

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