New Book Looks at Nonprofit Management Practices

Social Enterprise Newsletter, Summer 1999

When former Outward Bound CEO Allen Grossman embarked on a project to transfer Outward Bound pedagogy to public school education reform, he searched for nonprofit growth and strategy models. Much to his surprise, there weren't any. "So, I simply started using the models I had employed in my 20 years as a business practitioner, adapting and adopting them myself to the nonprofit world," states Grossman, currently an HBS senior lecturer. In time, Grossman's work evolved into a full-time career that connected him with others interested in nonprofit sustainability and performance, including Christine W. Letts, executive director of Harvard's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Management, and William P. Ryan, a consultant to foundations and non profits. Their collaboration resulted in the recently published book High Performance Nonprofit Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact (Wiley & Sons, 1998).

While focused initially on nonprofits involved with public education, Grossman saw that his work had the potential for broader impact. "Several foundations came to me and proposed that I build upon what I was doing. Working together, we started a project that looked at how business practices apply to the growth and sustainability of nonprofit organizations." The Going to Scale project, launched in 1993, focused on developing theories of practice for nonprofit organizations. "All that I learned, I would immediately apply to Outward Bound's emerging Expeditionary Learning public school initiative."

With the help of Letts and Ryan, the Going to Scale project evolved into a series of seminars and cross-sector roundtables that brought together leaders from the nonprofit, business, and academic disciplines. The book takes the program's findings and furthers the discussion on how enhanced nonprofit performance can lead to greater social impact. The authors outline approaches nonprofits can use to build learning and innovativeness into their organizations by using processes for human resources management, benchmarking, quality systems, and product development in their organizations. With case studies and examples as illustrations, Grossman, Letts, and Ryan demonstrate that creating high performing nonprofits leads to more effective impact.

Grossman and his coauthors make it clear that high performing nonprofits differ from businesses in how their results are defined. While they assert that the bottom line must be watched—especially when competing for philanthropic dollars -success is defined by how well organizations are accomplishing their mission.

As for Outward Bound's Expeditionary Learning initiative, today, seven years after its founding, it is profoundly impacting the lives of tens of thousands of students in 70 schools in 15 cities. The initiative is on target to become financially self-sufficient within the next three years.