The Non Nonprofit E-Book

Steve Rothschild

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 286

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A top business leader shares the business principles he used to launch both a top company and a thriving nonprofit Nonprofit leaders know that solving pervasive social problems requires passion and creativity as well as tangible results. The Non Nonprofit shares the same business principles that drive the world's best companies, showing how they can (and should) be applied to the realm of nonprofits. Steve Rothschild personally crossed sectors when he left corporate America to found Twin Cities RISE!, a highly successful poverty reduction program. His honest story, and success and missteps, create an essential roadmap for any social venture looking to prove and boost its impact. * Distills essential nonprofit principles such as having a clear and appropriate purpose, creating economic value from social benefit, and establishing mutual accountability * Shares successful approaches from innovative organizations such as Grameen Bank, Playworks, Common Ground, Habitat for Humanity, Lumni, Caring Bridge, College Summit and RISE! * Draws from the author's success in founding and building Twin Cities RISE!, which trains unemployed Minnesotans for living wage jobs. RISE! serves 1,500 participants each year As insightful as it is inspiring, The Non Nonprofit can help maximize the positive impact of any nonprofit.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for The Non Nonprofit

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Foreword: How This Book Will Benefit Us All

Introduction

WHY THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES ARE SO IMPORTANT NOW

THE SOCIAL ENTERPRISE MOVEMENT: NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INNOVATION

HOW THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES WERE DEVELOPED

SEVEN FOR-PROFIT PRINCIPLES THAT BUILD NONPROFIT SUCCESS

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS BOOK

1 Principle #1: Have a Clear and Appropriate Purpose

HOW RISE! DEVELOPED ITS PURPOSE AND MISSION

RISE!’S PURPOSE AND MISSION —AND HOW THEY HELP US SUCCEED

THE ALL-IMPORTANT ALIGNMENT OF PURPOSE, MISSION, AND PROGRAMS

WHEN MISSION MET REALITY AT COMMON GROUND

COMMUNICATING YOUR PURPOSE TO EACH GROUP OF STAKEHOLDERS

STAYING FINANCIALLY SECURE WHILE HOLDING TRUE TO YOUR MISSION

A SENSE OF PURPOSE IS ESSENTIAL FOR HUMAN SURVIVAL

2 Principle #2: Measure What Counts

THE DIFFERENCE IN MEASURING INPUTS, OUTPUTS, AND OUTCOMES

GRAMEEN BANK: CLEARLY DEFINING THE OUTCOME

WHY ORGANIZATIONS DON’T MEASURE OUTCOMES

WHAT GOOD OUTCOMES MEASUREMENT LOOKS LIKE

THE DANGER OF APPLES-TO-ORANGES COMPARISONS

MOVING TOWARD THE FUTURE IN MEASUREMENT

3 Principle #3: Be Market Driven

IDENTIFYING THE CUSTOMER AT CARINGBRIDGE

THE MARKET IS ALWAYS CHANGING: LISTEN AND BE FLEXIBLE

HOW A MARKET-DRIVEN APPROACH PLAYS OUT AT PLAYWORKS

CUSTOMERS MAKE THE BEST ADVISORS AND AMBASSADORS

MARKETING MEANS LEARNING THE CUSTOMER’S CULTURE

MISPERCEPTIONS CAN CHALLENGE A MARKET-DRIVEN APPROACH

BY SERVING ITS CUSTOMERS, A MARKET-DRIVEN NONPROFIT SERVES EVERY STAKEHOLDER

4 Principle #4: Create Mutual Accountability

HOW RISE! PRACTICES ACCOUNTABILITY WITH ALL ITS STAKEHOLDERS

HOW HABITAT FOR HUMANITY CREATES MUTUAL ACCOUNTABILITY WITH PARTNERSHIP AND SWEAT EQUITY

ACCOUNTABILITY IS POSSIBLE ONLY WITH EMPOWERMENT

5 Principle #5: Support Personal Empowerment

HOW GENERATIONAL POVERTY DAMAGES PERSONAL EMPOWERMENT

TRADITIONAL SOFT-SKILLS VERSUS EMPOWERMENT TRAINING

TEACHING EMPOWERMENT AT RISE!

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF EMPOWERMENT TRAINING

THE ROAD TO EMPOWERMENT

EMPOWERMENT IN ACTION: HOW OTHER ORGANIZATIONS HAVE PUT EMPOWERMENT TO WORK FOR THEM

THE POWER OF EMPOWERMENT TRAINING TO BUILD MORE EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATIONS

6 Principle #6: Create Economic Value from Social Benefit

CARINGBRIDGE: ESTABLISHING VALUE

CALCULATING THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF SOCIAL BENEFITS

ESTABLISHING ECONOMIC VALUE AT RISE!

BUILDING RELIABLE SOURCES OF CAPITAL FOR NONPROFITS AND SOCIAL ENTERPRISES

THE IMPORTANCE OF MARKET RATE INVESTMENT

7 Principle #7: Be Learning Driven

GRAMEEN BANK: LEARNING TO BE FLEXIBLE

BUILDING AN ENDURING LEARNING CULTURE

PLAYWORKS: LEARNING TO SCALE

LESSONS LEARNED AT RISE!

ONGOING LEARNING

8 The Principles in Practice

THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES AT WORK IN NONPROFITS AND SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

THE PRINCIPLES: PROVEN FOR-PROFIT THINKING THAT WILL STRENGTHEN ANY NONPROFIT

Appendix A: What You Can Do to Make a Difference

Appendix B: A Note on the Organizations in This Book

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Praise for The Non Nonprofit

“Steve Rothschild’s fresh thinking translates proven strategies that successful businesses employ every day into practical approaches to confronting centuries-old issues like poverty. No partisan politics, no fancy tricks—just fundamental, time-tested solutions.”

—Harvey Mackay, author, Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive

“As a Twin Cities RISE! customer, I can say unequivocally that the seven principles in The Non Nonprofit work. RISE! provides just the type of employee that every company needs to be successful: self-motivated, engaged, skilled, productive, and emotionally mature. The employer community would do well to take much greater advantage of this underutilized organization.”

—David Abrams, vice president, North Memorial Health Care

“I’ve observed from the beginning of his anti-poverty work Steve Rothschild’s efforts to put his principles into practice. I’ve observed with the skeptical eye of an evaluator. I’ve seen hundreds of good ideas and hopeful visions flounder in the face of complex realities. I’m not easily impressed. But what Rothschild has accomplished impresses. The principles he identifies, explains, and illustrates have broad applicability. He has learned a great deal about what works. Anyone who cares about making a difference should pay attention to what he’s learned—it’s all here.”

—Michael Quinn Patton, founder and director, Utilization-Focused Evaluation; former president, American Evaluation Association

“As director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for six years in the 1990s, I presided over the U.S. government’s global poverty reduction efforts. Steve Rothschild reminds me of the innovators whose practical approaches changed the world of development, people like Hernando De Soto and Muhammad Yunus. Rothschild understands incentives, accountability, and personal improvement. His Twin Cities RISE! is a learning-driven organization that empowers challenged citizens to overcome their issues and succeed. Rothschild’s RISE! is not afraid to establish a bottom line and is eager to be held accountable for achieving it. The Non Nonprofit and its recipes for success are a must-read for those who are truly concerned about poverty, here or anywhere.”

—J. Brian Atwood, former dean, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota; chair, Development Assistance Committee, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

“I take pride in being one of the many people Steve Rothschild met and talked with when he was first thinking of starting what turned out to be Twin Cities RISE! I must admit that while I thought his market-based approach was exquisitely on target, I was concerned he wasn’t giving adequate weight to the many attitudinal and behavioral shortcomings that keep large numbers of people impoverished. More than fifteen years later, it’s clear I was wrong, as I know of no analyst or practitioner in the United States who better understands how efforts to help poor people must meld both economically grounded and culturally grounded approaches.”

—Mitch Pearlstein, founder and CEO, Center for the American Experiment

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Rothschild. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Imprint

One Montgomery Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594

www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.

Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax [phone].

Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rothschild, Steve.

 The non nonprofit : for-profit thinking for nonprofit success / Steve Rothschild; foreword by Bill George. —1st ed.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-02181-1 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-18020-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-18021-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-18022-8 (ebk)

 1. Nonprofit organizations—Management. I. Title.

 HD62.6.R68 2012

 658'.048—dc23

2011041307

For my wife, Marilyn,

whose love, dedication, and encouragement

have sustained me for fifty years

Foreword

How This Book Will Benefit Us All

How many highly successful corporate executives walk away from a top job in midcareer to devote themselves to reducing poverty in our crime-ridden American inner cities? Steve Rothschild is the only one I know. He left a senior executive role at General Mills, spent a year studying the twin problems of racism and inner-city poverty, and then used his own money to found Twin Cities RISE!

I first met Steve in 1980 when we were together at a Berlitz class as he was building the Yoplait yogurt business for General Mills. Steve impressed me with his passion and his persistence, qualities that are writ large throughout this book. For years we challenged each other on the tennis court, talked between sets about our dreams of running a major company that could help people, and shared the frustrations we faced in our work.

One day I called Steve to tell him I had decided to join Medtronic, thinking my long-time friend would be enthusiastic about my move. When I shared my good news, there was a long silence at the other end of the phone. Confused, I asked Steve what he was feeling. After a long pause, he said, “I wish I was moving on as well.” Steve confided that he was no longer inspired by his work and was feeling restless to do something more meaningful with his life.

So I wasn’t surprised a few months later when he called to say he had resigned from General Mills. I immediately assumed he would move into a top corporate job at another company, a destiny that was clearly in his grasp. Instead, like the farmer who lets his fields go fallow for a season, Steve used the next year to get closer to his family and explore challenges in the Minneapolis community.

One day while serving on the Minneapolis Initiative Against Racism, Steve wondered what it must be like for an inner-city youth who was flipping hamburgers for a living. What hope did he have of making something of his life, of escaping from a dead-end job? Rothschild resolved then to explore the twin issues of poverty and racism in much greater depth to see what could be done about them.

In these pages, Rothschild shares what he has learned about the most intractable problem in our society today: the poverty concentrated in our inner cities that leads to the downward cycle of failure, hopelessness, despair, violence, crime, and eventually prison—and then repeats itself across generations. It is not a problem that many Americans want to address. Long ago the politicians stopped talking about the problems of the poor and started focusing primarily on the middle class.

Instead of rushing headlong into these problems with quick-fix solutions, Rothschild studied them carefully and talked to countless people in Minnesota and elsewhere about what could be done to correct them. His explorations led him to found Twin Cities RISE! It is based on the bedrock principles of creating value for employers and society to enable the poorest of the poor to qualify for jobs that pay more than $10 per hour.

To make RISE! successful, Rothschild focused all his energies on his new organization, using funds from his personal savings. Applying his enormous leadership and executive talents, he helped the inner-city poor who wrestle daily with the twin problems of discrimination and poverty to rise above their wounds and find a purpose for their lives. In so doing, Steve and RISE! (and RISE!’s graduates) faced the ravages of generational poverty head-on, encountered their ugliest aspects, and found a way to wrestle them to the ground.

RISE! is not just another social service agency that provides education and training programs for hard-to-employ individuals. It is also a success story that demonstrates the benefits of a new approach to addressing our social ills—one that applies sound capitalistic principles, like value creation and return on investment, to enable the most economically challenged citizens to achieve economic self-sufficiency.

Achieving success with RISE! hasn’t been easy for Rothschild. Through his experiences, he’s learned that preparing people for good jobs takes a lot more than skills training. First, the students have to face their own life stories, crucibles, and lack of self-worth head-on in order to then gain self-awareness and empowerment. Rothschild has also found it difficult to convince employers of the value that RISE! graduates offer them.

As he realized his goals locally with Twin Cities RISE! Rothschild began to focus on using these experiences to create a national model for addressing our social ills. The Non Nonprofit sets forth that model in a clear way and demonstrates how we can attack the greatest problems of our society and our world.

In visiting the Minneapolis offices of Twin Cities RISE! I discovered the remarkable parallels between Rothschild’s work in preparing its students for good jobs and my own work in enabling leaders in corporations to step up to important leadership roles. Before they can become fully effective, both groups have to deal with their crucibles and past wounds, discover the passion for their purpose, become empowered, accept personal accountability for results, and continue to learn from their experiences, all based on a sound set of economic principles.

As Steve Rothschild demonstrates, this is not an easy process, and there is no such thing as five easy steps to economic self-sufficiency. But these commonsense principles will improve the results of any nonprofit, or for-profit for that matter, whether it is struggling or performing well. They will help sharpen an organization’s focus, strengthen its organizational culture, and improve its results.

In this marvelous book, Steve Rothschild shares the same sound business principles he used at General Mills and later to found two nonprofits. Every social enterprise can benefit from these rigorous, real-world approaches, whether applied to traditional nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, or government. The Non Nonprofit brings to life this unique twenty-first-century approach to solving our social problems across America, and policymakers, politicians, and all others who want to build a more productive and just society ought to study it carefully.

Bill George

Minneapolis, Minnesota

December 2011

Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and the author of True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. He is the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, Inc.

Introduction

Historically, the most common response to social ills like poverty, homelessness, and poor education has been to spend more money. When money is tight, concerned citizens ramp up their efforts for more fundraising, more requests for federal grants and government funding, and, ultimately, more investment in short-term solutions to solve long-term problems. But these traditional efforts rarely yield sustainable long-term results. To make progress, leaders—in government, funding organizations, business, nonprofits, and social enterprise—need a new approach. They need an approach that integrates the best ideas of social programming with the expertise that the for-profit sector has acquired in achieving long-term outcomes. This book presents seven principles that equip leaders to do just that. These principles have demonstrated their ability to build healthy, effective organizations in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Now we need to put them to work so that all organizations that strive to improve the social good can thrive through good economic times and bad.