Breakthrough Thinking for Nonprofit Organizations: Creative Strategies for Extraordinary Results 1st Edition

I took about 5 books out of the library. this was after about 5 years of reading about grassroots NGOs. 'Breakthrough' was so good that I returned the other books, renewed this one and finally bought it from Amazon. I could use it myself, share with board members and even pass some ideas onto donors. It's a keeper.

Good performance is no longer enough for nonprofits; nonprofits must set and achieve breakthrough goals. Managers and board members need to think in new and creative ways about how they define and meet the challenges they face and the strategies and techniques required to achieve extraordinary performance in fundraising, service delivery and overall results. Almost all nonprofits are affected to some extent by nine change drivers. There are five internal change drivers: organizations need a new mission or vision or they will run out of steam; the speed of business requires more decisions made faster; rising costs require new ways to deliver service from a distance; high profile service failure may require drastic measures such as clearing out top management to win back public confidence; new technology may make a nonprofit redundant or may offer opportunities to improve ways of doing business. There are also four external drivers of change: changes in public perception may result in being dropped from people's consciousness or require 24/7 availability; rapid public awareness of disasters quickly changes priorities; competition for funds has increased as distinctions between nonprofits, the public sector and the private sector has blurred; technology change can make old solutions redundant. Nonprofits that fail to answer two fundamental questions: where do we want to go? and how do we get there? may find themselves wandering in a fog, not knowing how they got into their current situation and wondering what is the right way to go. The decision to go for breakthrough is a strategic one involving risk and asking questions such as 'what is the worst thing that can happen if breakthrough goes wrong?' and 'how likely is it that the worst thing will happen?' and 'what can we do to minimize the risk of the worst thing happening?' and 'should we have a Plan B to cope with problems?' After appraising the risks and challenges and adopting a strategy you still need to decide on the approach required to encourage the people and innovation needed and the leadership required. Even then you need to ask 'to what extent do the improvements and changes made match up to what is needed?'Once an organization has decided to transform its performance to have an impact on the need/performance gap or to achieve its potential, plotting the position on a life cycle chart can be very helpful. Organizations decide to change at various points in their life cycle and for different reasons. The challenge with the most common change point - just past the peak - is that the organization has to break out of its comfort zones and one way is to think about a dramatically improved level of performance. To drive that change a vision of the new performance level has to be agreed together with positive and negative drivers to provide pleasure and avoid pain. Two words have proved exceptionally useful in setting new goals - kaizen and horshin - because they describe not only the nature of the goals but the change process. Kaizen is slow, incremental change that leads, over time to significant improvement in performance. After the second world war Japan applied kaizen to a whole range of activities, including their car industry by setting a long-term world class performance goal and breaking it down into small, achievable chunks. Horshin is about sudden, exponential, discontinuous and radical change that leads to dramatically improved performance in a relatively short period of time. This process resulted in Sony's Walkman becoming one of the most widely used personal electronic devices on the planet. It was used by the National Trust in raising $7.5 in 200 days to save Mt. Snowdon in Wales for public use. In practice most organizations need a mixture of both kaizen and horshin as some areas of work need the stability and methodical progress of kaizen while others need the drive, transformation and vision implicit in horshin. An organization could have ten goals as part of a three-year strategic plan of which six might be kaizen and four horshin. Balance is important as you cannot transform everything overnight and you need to focus and emphasize a small number of key areas to transform quickly.Engaging a horshin goal can be very stimulating such as Kennedy's "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth" or Fords " My vision is to build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be at so low a price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one". Many nonprofits build on Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" to express mission as an overarching, simple, concrete horshin goal while others are more specific such as "To become a world-class center for research of childhood diseases and to radically reduce their incidence." To achieve breakthrough, language is important as it helps people to shift into a different mindset, distinguish breakthrough goals from ordinary goals and to think creatively about 'how to' as well as 'what'.The remaining eight chapters of 'Breakthrough Thinking for Nonprofit Organizations' deal with unlocking potential, releasing creativity, creating a smart organization, mapping the possibilities, balancing creativity and innovation, challenging mind sets, driving change and working in a breakthrough organization. It is difficult to imagine than anyone connected with a nonprofit could not profit from this book.

Good book. I liked it! It was easy to read. Each chapter had a summary section so I could read the summaries before tackling the book as a whole. If you are managing a not-for-profit, or sitting as a board member to a nonprofit, and you believe your nonprofit could be doing things better, then consider getting a copy of this book and give it a read.Back in July I read and reviewed "Managing Business Change for Dummies," by Beth Evard (ISBN: 0764553321), which focused on how managers successfully deal with employees who resist change in an organization. This book on the other hand focuses on how YOU, the manager, must deal with YOUR resistance to change so you can improve your organization's performance in the process.The author lists nine "change drivers:"1. New Mission or Vision2. Speed of Business3. Cost Reduction4. Service Failure5. New Technology6. Change in Public Perception7. Change in Priorities8. Competition for Funds and Resources9. Change in TechnologyWhen your organization is hit by one or more of the above events you are going to have to implement change at your organization. This book provides examples of best practices as to how to do this. Also, the authors include exercises from their workshops on this subject. Both the best practices and exercises are very helpful to help us grasp what the authors are talking about.If you are like me you can examine the Table of Contents for this book online and after doing so you will probably say: Wow, what is this book really about. The chapter titles are kind of weak is what I'm really trying to say. It's the chapter summaries, best practices examples, and exercises that make the book a worthwhile investment of your time.I would have liked the book much better if the authors had organized it so it did not feel like just another book put together by a management consulting group. Yeah, it felt like one of "those" to me. And after you read 2 of them, they all start to sound the same. But since this book is informative, well written, and not too long I'm inclined to give it 5 stars.

Whilst there is some useful stuff in this book I wouldn't recommend it to anyone with basic business knowledge and knowledge of change processes. I realise many non-profits are small and can be unsophisticated at times in their approach, but so many are the opposite and I'm not sure how well this would serve them.Certainly has some approaches worth trying - but, for me, I found the tone patronising and therefore irritating to read. Like a teacher that knows their stuff but you just can't bear to listen to.

this book gives you clues to make the breaktrough in your organization.is essential to reed the if you want to be a food fundraiser.