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100 Days
If nonprofit culture suffers widely from any endemic weakness, often they are too long to think and too slow to act.
Good process – which can be a strength – becomes a debilitating weakness when it slows organizations down too much. Lifespans of opportunities are increasingly shorter. People and organizations that can get traction and quickly advance enjoy a significant competitive advantage over those that spin their wheels in analysis paralysis.
Knowing more about a problem won’t solve it.
After a presentation I gave to a client’s Board of Directors recently, the Board’s Chairman challenged my client organization to prioritize its strategy set using a 100-day implementation and evaluation horizon. One hundred days. This time horizon is not exactly commonplace in the nonprofit sector.
My client’s Board Chairman is not only an affable, low-key, and charming gentleman, he is also Chairman and CEO of a Fortune 100 corporation. After pondering his advice for several days, I have really come to embrace the merit of his words.
It is not that long-term strategies don’t matter or don’t work – it’s just that we often don’t know which of our strategy set will improve performance quickest. When performance must improve quickly, prioritizing implementation based on how soon a strategy will produce results as opposed to how big the results may be over the long haul makes sense.
What my client’s Chairman knows that many of us don’t is deceptively simple. We don’t always know what works and what doesn’t. Since it is increasingly difficult to improve performance in organizations, we need to be able to assess what works and what doesn’t much more quickly.
Management gurus have been talking about the virtue of speed for decades. “Ready, Fire, Aim� is just one aphorism reminding managers that organizations can learn quickest from acting. Whether the action is a mistake or not is not the point. So long as it’s a short and affordable mistake, the window of opportunity may still be open.
It comes down to how savvy we are in valuing opportunity. A strong case may be made today that opportunity is more valuable than pure capital.
It’s tough to teach organizations that time is often more important than money. But the fact that the lesson is tough to learn doesn’t mean that we don’t need to learn it.
Posted on February 6, 2006 09:32 AM | Permalink
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