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Monolog: Loretta Donovan
In the standing "Monolog" column, The Sophist asks an individual to share his or her point of view on issues pertinent to those involved with nonprofits and other socially focused organizations. In this issue, we hear from Loretta Donovan of the Girl Scouts of the USA.
Name: Loretta Donovan
Title: Senior director, Organization & Employee Development
Organization: Girl Scouts of the USA (http://www.girlscouts.org/)
Least Favorite Buzzword: "Best practices" because what organizations do successfully is highly contextual and based on the expertise and relationships of people--not on a report of a way of work.
Favorite Web Site: Well, I’ll have to mention two. The first is Learnativity (http://www.learnativity.com/) because Marcia Conner has catalogued the landscape of individual and organizational learning in a highly accessible way. This is high on my go-to list since nonprofits often leave staff and volunteer learning low on their list of priorities. The second is Milano MiX (http://www.lcmmix.org/), a superb source for management techniques and tools that have been gleaned from many sources for community organizations. It’s nice to find a rich source of ideas that are aimed at the needs of nonprofit managers.
Favorite Quotation: “One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways." --Edith Wharton
Recommended Reading: I always have several books that I’m reading at the same time. The topics of social network analysis and communities of practice are interesting to me right now. I think if you are involved in nonprofits, the significance of how people connect in productive ways to build social capital for organizations is key to how we join forces to achieve our mission to the public. I suggest The Hidden Power of Social Networks by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker and Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William Snyder.
Prediction for the Sector: I haven’t used a crystal ball in quite a while...and learned early on that extrapolating from what’s going on now to predict long-term trends can get you in lots of trouble. That having been said, nonprofits will continue to take a hard look at strategy, accountability, and performance. This is a fall-out of the ethics gap in corporations, 9/11, and the downturn in the economy over the last few years. Enron, WorldCom, etc., have made everyone more aware of the importance of a moral compass and monitoring its direction. People leaving jobs in industry are looking for meaning in their work rather than just another job. They come to the nonprofit sector with advanced degrees in finance, law, marketing, etc., and have the know-how to develop and use metrics that demonstrate impact and outcomes. This may be unfamiliar territory to their new colleagues who worked in the sector for many years without these skills--some tension between the new employees and tenured ones may be inevitable. Funders, whether foundations, corporations, the government, or individuals, are influencing this trend as they look for quantitative measures upon which to base their contributions. In the end, this is a win for everyone as clearer thinking and more finely tuned management focus on aligning resources to deliver what is important given the organization’s mission.
Hedgehog or Fox?* There has been “one big thing” that keeps me focused--how continuous, strategic learning empowers people and strengthens organizations--and so I declare that I am a hedgehog. While many ends may interest the fox, I am attracted to a single end and use many means to get there. The result is a balance of purpose and energy for uncovering the pathways that organization members need to work smarter. My ultimate question is always, “What have we learned from that experience?”
* This alludes to Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in which he uses a line from the Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.") as the basis for dividing writers and thinkers into one of two categories: the hedgehogs "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance" and the foxes "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause…seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision." Berlin says Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust are hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, and Joyce are foxes.
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