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Monolog: Ed Batista
"Monolog" is a standing feature of The Sophist in which we ask one person to share his or her point of view on issues pertinent to those involved with socially-focused organizations.
Name: Ed Batista
Title: Executive Director
Organization: N-TEN, or Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (http://www.nten.org/)
Least Favorite Buzzword: "Integrated." It's been used in so many different ways in so many different places as to become meaningless--but it's also incredibly hard to cut out of our vocabulary because it's so flexible. It's the poster child for these amorphous buzzwords to which we've all become addicted.
Favorite Web Site: I recommend http://groups.google.com/. Google's resurrection of Usenet in Web-accessible form has made it so easy to find all kinds of useful knowledge that's not likely to be found in more organized, structured forms. It's also full of hilarious flame wars.
Favorite Quotation: For a long time I carried this Robert Kennedy quote in my wallet every day: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope... and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." I don't carry it around anymore, but I'm not sure if that's because I've gotten old and cynical, or just because I have a smaller wallet.
Recommended Reading: I’m going to be a little self-indulgent and recommend a brief reading list, instead of just one thing:
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The Answer to How Is Yes, Peter Block, Berrett-Koehler, 2002, ISBN: 1576751686,
http://www.designedlearning.com/bookinfo_answertohowisyes.asp. A truly stimulating and thought-provoking book on one’s approach to work (and life in general).
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"Managing Oneself," Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2000,
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=4444. An incredibly powerful (and concise) article on how to make the best use of your skills and manage your own professional development.
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Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations, Mike Allison and Jude Kaye, John Wiley & Sons, 1997, ISBN: 0471178322,
http://search.compasspoint.org/bookstore/home.lasso. The best organizational planning guide I've read, combining a deep understanding of what's unique about nonprofits with rigorous analytical tools from other industries.
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The eNonprofit: A Guide to ASPs, Internet Services, and Online Software, Michael Stein and John Kenyon, CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, 2002,
http://search.compasspoint.org/bookstore/home.lasso. I get paid to know who's doing what in the nonprofit technology field, and I still refer to this guide regularly. (How about an update, Michael and John?)
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All of Us: The Collected Poems, Raymond Carver, Vintage Books, 2000, ISBN: 0375703802. Has absolutely nothing to do with nonprofits or technology--but Carver is just the sort of writer who makes me remember why I hope to do a small bit of good in the world.
Prediction for the Sector: Here’s a hunch based more on my instincts than on objective research: Although there’s still a significant number of nonprofits that have yet to make their way up the technology learning curve, there’s an equally significant number of organizations that have moved far beyond the basic application of technology and are looking to do something more creative and productive. As these relatively tech-savvy groups increase (and as they hire extremely tech-savvy young people), the knowledge gap that separates tech service providers from their nonprofit clients will close, and the service providers are going to be challenged to do more. The nonprofits themselves will increasingly drive the development of innovative applications of technology within the sector, and tech service providers will have to know more about a nonprofit’s mission, clients and objectives in order to add value--simply being more technically proficient than the nonprofit won’t be enough.
Hedgehog or Fox?* I understand the appeal of being a hedgehog--having a unified philosophy or worldview at least sounds impressive. But I don't think life really works that way--big, overarching ideas can capture attention and galvanize people into action for a limited time, but big ideas are almost by definition full of contradictions, and the movements they spawn have a lot of unintended consequences. I think life is messier and more complicated--lots of smaller ideas jostling and competing, rising and falling over time. This is not to say that I'm a total relativist--I do believe in some universal truths--but I’m generally suspicious of most claims to universality. And my attention span is too short to be a hedgehog, anyway--so I guess I’m a fox.
* 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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