Allen Grossman was appointed a Harvard Business School Professor of Management Practice in July 2000. He joined the Business School faculty in July 1998, with a concurrent appointment as a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Outward Bound USA for 6 years before stepping down in 1997 to work on the challenges of creating high performing nonprofit organizations. His current research focuses on business engagement in public education, leadership and management of public school districts, and leading and governing high performing nonprofit organizations.
Mr. Grossman has authored or co-authored numerous cases, articles and three books including Managing School Districts for High Performance; High Performance Nonprofit Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact; and the Harvard Business Review article, Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists.
In the MBA program, Mr. Grossman has taught, among other courses, Leading and Governing High Performing Nonprofit Organizations, Social Entrepreneurship, and Leadership and Corporate Accountability. In executive education, Mr. Grossman co-founded the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a joint project of HBS and HGSE; he served as faculty co-chair of PELP until 2013. He co-founded and co-chaired Performance Measurement and Management of Nonprofit Organizations (PMNO). He has also taught in numerous other executive education programs.
Before joining the nonprofit sector, he served as a Regional Chief Executive of Albert Fisher PLC and Chairman of the Board of GPC, a national distributor of packaging products. Mr. Grossman serves on and has chaired a number of nonprofit and for-profit boards. He is currently the chair of Mercy Corps, an international development organization. He received a B.S. in corporate finance from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen S. Grossman and Susan Moore Johnson
Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human capital management, resource allocation, and accountability and performance improvement systems to support an overarching strategy. This central idea provides a valuable conceptual framework for current and future school leaders.
The case studies presented in Managing School Districts for High Performance grow out of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a unique partnership between the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a network of urban school districts. This rich array of cases explores the managerial challenges districts face as they seek to ensure rich learning opportunities and high achievement for all students across a system of schools.
Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen S. Grossman and Susan Moore Johnson
Teaching by the case method has the potential to affect profoundly the way that teachers, students, and professionals approach the learning process. This companion volume includes detailed teaching notes on each case in the coursebook, with an emphasis on making cases drawn from other disciplines relevant to education administrators. It also includes C. Roland Christensen's classic essay on teaching by the case method, "The Premises and Practices of Discussion Teaching." Both experienced instructors and those new to the case method will find this instructor's guide an invaluable resource.
Many of our largest and most successful companies today did not exist 50 years ago. During this same time interval, companies that ranked among top in the 1960s have disappeared, been merged out of existence, or become much smaller presences in the U.S. industrial scene. These shifts in fortunes are vivid examples of the private sector's cycle of Schumpeterian creative destruction. In contrast, the list of the largest nonprofit organizations has remained stable over decades. Large nonprofits do not disappear and few new ones—Habitat for Humanity and Teach for America are among the exceptions—scale to national size. Schumpeter's cycle apparently does not operate in the social sector. This paper proposes that the disparity arises from the nonprofit sector's historically immature infrastructure and poor mechanisms for channeling funds from donors and foundations to the most effective nonprofits and away from underperforming ones. We illustrate how innovative information and financial intermediaries, using new measurement approaches tailored for the nonprofit sector, have recently arisen to help direct funds to the most effective nonprofits. These innovations have the potential to enable the sector to become far more responsive, effective, and efficient in creating positive social impact at a national scale.
Grossman, Allen. "Social Enterprise Series No. 12: Philanthropic Social Capital Markets Performance Driven Philanthropy." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 00-002, July 1999. (Presented at December 2001 Human Interaction Research Institute at 40 Conference. Monograph available from HIRI.)
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In 2010 the Memphis City School District merged with the neighboring Shelby County School system under the supervision of a single board of education and superintendent. It promised much more than just administrative synergies—it was an opportunity to change a culture, as well as policies and practices that had existed for decades.
By 2010 Shelby County school system had about 50,000 students, approximately 55 percent white and 37 percent economically disadvantaged. The Memphis student body, which numbered around 100,000, was about 85 percent black and 87 percent economically disadvantaged. In 2010, residents from within and outside the city each contributed about 50 percent of the tax revenue for the two systems, but, based on enrollment, two-thirds of the budget was allocated to Memphis City schools.
Pitt Hyde and the Hyde Family Foundation saw the merger as a once-in-a-lifetime fresh start for public education in Memphis and he was determined to do what he could to make sure the merger realized its potential. Many interests, practices and players were deeply entrenched in the Memphis schools. But Hyde and his wife had encountered like-minded reformers—educators, government officials, business people and not-for-profit leaders who were willing to put a shoulder to the wheel. Prior to the merger, the Hydes had notched some considerable successes, starting with the legislation that permitted establishment of the state's first charter schools. They had established valuable partnerships, and developed performance standards and accountability for teachers and administrators. They had helped inaugurate pay-for-performance for teachers and a teacher evaluation system based on student outcomes. Building relationships, raising the money, getting others involved were critical steps along the way. They had brought new voices into the campaign. He also remembered some false steps and some lost battles, but overall their decisions had been sound, their efforts focused, and perhaps most important, their perseverance relentless.
StriveTogether aimed to improve education outcomes by coordinating the actions of diverse community stakeholders—nonprofit service providers, school districts, government, parents, businesses and others. StriveTogether had an intense focus on collective impact—"the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem"—and the use of data to drive decisions. In the case, managing director Jeff Edmondson is faced with two dilemmas: how to attract business engagement in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, California, and how to achieve greater results in the communities that had implemented the StriveTogether framework.
Hugo Moreno, CEO of Salud Digna, was considering his growth options for the next three years. Would becoming a for-profit with access to greater capital be the best strategy or would this cause the organization to lose its social mission? Salud Digna provided diagnostic medical tests to the poor, had experienced rapid growth, and was financially self-sufficient. Moreno was determined that the organization be as well managed as any company in Mexico.
When Diane Paulus, artistic director and CEO of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) first started in 2008, she attracted media coverage around an aesthetic that aimed to give the audience more ownership over the theater experience, excited theatergoers by experimenting with new venues and received critical recognition for the breadth and range of the work she staged. Paulus also recognized the changing realities in theater, which included dropping subscription numbers and an increase in single ticket buyers. Paulus, inspired by the mission of the A.R.T.—to expand the boundaries of theater—hastened a shift in the A.R.T. business model. Her new plans included operating two unique segmented venues, creating and presenting varied content that aimed to be both challenging and popular, and driving a sales and marketing campaign focused on single ticket buyers, memberships and dynamic pricing. Early results showed some promise; the A.R.T. was closer to break-even than in previous years. However, some questioned if the A.R.T. was beginning to look like a commercial theater, focused on presenting theater that sold, rather than truly expanding boundaries. Despite the questioning, Paulus remained committed to fulfilling her vision of the A.R.T. mission in order to solidify A.R.T. as a leading and financially stable not-for-profit regional theater.
Grossman, Allen S. "Salud Digna: Successfully Competing with For-Profit Organizations (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 312-056, September 2011.
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The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, focused on building the organizational capabilities of nonprofits that served the disadvantaged youth in the United States, has recently been named an intermediary in the federal government's new social innovation fund (SIF), which is intended to bring together public-private funds to help expand effective solutions across three issue areas: economic opportunity, healthy futures, and youth development. SIF intermediaries would be responsible for directing resources to innovative community-based nonprofit organizations that were seeing results. Edna McConnell Clark Foundation had long been a promoter of evidence-based accountability and grantmaking and saw the absence of an efficient capital market in the nonprofit sector as a major impediment to funding growth, increasing scale, and building the sustainability of successful nonprofit organizations. With its Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot (GCAP), Edna McConnell Clark Foundation had seen positive results in taking a "syndicate" approach to funding a select group of nonprofits. With it being named an SIF intermediary, Edna McConnell Clark was ready to build on its GCAP experience and continue to evolve a model that would provide, at increased efficiency, growth capital for successful organizations. The foundation hoped to build a capital aggregation approach that would serve as a model for philanthropy.
Ren Levy took over Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts when it was a group of warring constituents and has successfully brought a diverse group of arts organizations together.
Year Up, a nonprofit job-skills training program for low-income, urban youth has run four successful programs in four cities for the past seven years. Now, after an ambitious capital campaign, the organization is poised to grow into a national program in an attempt to reach the 4.3 million disconnected youth in the United States, but will the organization be able to maintain high-quality results as it goes to scale?
Grossman, Allen S. "Year Up: A Social Entrepreneur Builds High Performance (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 311-101, February 2011.
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Dedicated to accelerating the development of a safe, effective, accessible, preventive HIV vaccine, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) pioneered ways of addressing the inadequate incentive structures that prevented progress toward vaccines for AIDS and other diseases predominantly affecting poor populations in tropical countries. As an intermediary nonprofit organization, IAVI brought together partners with different perspectives and motivations from nonprofit, industry, government, and scientific research sectors toward developing vaccines. IAVI played several roles: honest broker, integrator, and communicator of knowledge regarding AIDS vaccine research; passionate advocate for AIDS vaccines at national and international levels; and coordinator and manager of research and development initiatives. In 2008, IAVI invested further in its own laboratories and research infrastructure, moving a step upstream in vaccine development partnerships and clinical research. How should IAVI manage tensions between what is necessary to achieve its mission and what is necessary to build new incentive structures that enable key actors to work together effectively?
The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), is a successful nonprofit poised on the verge of explosive growth. The senior management contracted with McKinsey consultants to help guide the process. The founders of NFTE brought it from a small program run out of their apartment to a $7 million enterprise operating in 43 states and 14 countries. Yet, it is a loose organization run by mission-driven entrepreneurs who manage to succeed by grit, charisma, and inspiring others. McKinsey is an icon of rational business planning; its advice is data driven and impassionate. For NFTE to go to the next step of its development, it must radically change the organization and introduce both structure and discipline to themselves and others. This will require a number of difficult choices and behavioral changes. Was this a good partnership? Can NFTE succeed in making the necessary changes? Is the plan appropriate for the organization?
Allen S. Grossman, Thomas J. Steenburgh, Lauren Susan Mehler and Matthew Benjamin Oppenheimer
As with many national non-profits, Planned Parenthood is organized as 100 separate 501(c)3 organizations. What is the best structure for Planned Parenthood to fulfill its mission?
Many in the nonprofit sector doubt whether organizational performance can be measured. Jumpstart, a 10-year-old nonprofit, developed performance measurement and management systems from its inception. The organization has experienced explosive growth and attributes a great deal of its success to creating a performance culture.
The Bridgespan Group was launched in 2000 by management consulting group Bain & Company as a nonprofit focused on strategy consulting for nonprofits and philanthropists. Over the next eight years, Bridgespan expanded its services to include executive search, knowledge sharing, and a web-based job matching service. While its growth was welcome, Bridgespan's leaders and board wanted to strengthen Bridgespan's positive impact on the nonprofit sector as a whole.
Tennessee-based nonprofit Youth Villages had an impressive record of serving emotionally and behaviorally troubled youth and their families, with higher success rates and lower costs than most child services providers. Yet expanding to offer its services on a broader scale proved challenging.
Grossman, Allen S., Cathy Ross, and William Foster. "Youth Villages." Harvard Business School Case 309-007, November 2008. (Revised April 2010.)
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Grossman, Allen S. "Youth Villages: The challenges of scaling a nonprofit with government as the primary funding source (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 310-078, January 2010.
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Montgomery County Business Roundtable for Education (MCBRE) was a business-public education partnership with Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) that promoted cross-sector knowledge sharing and academic excellence. Its suite of core student programs, such as “720,” where business leaders addressed nearly half of the ninth-grade class about the importance of achievement in high school, and the Young Professionals Conference, an event for juniors that highlighted exciting business practices, allowed businesses to connect with students at the individual level. At the same time, the creation of platforms for business-education learning brought system-level improvements. In particular, MCBRE's board of advisors meetings brought together top executives from companies such as Lockheed Martin, NASDAQ, and PricewaterhouseCoopers with MCPS leaders to learn about management and leadership practices. After leading MCBRE for the past five years, first as executive director and now as board chair, Jane Kubasik was leaving. While the newly hired executive director, Heather Schwager, was more than qualified to take over, there were some concerns. Kubasik had planned and implemented most of MCBRE's current initiatives and single-handedly recruited nearly all of MCBRE's current members. Would MCBRE be able to retain its impressive membership without Kubasik? With its selective invite-only criteria for new members, would MCBRE be able to continue to grow? Should growth even be a goal?
This note introduces students to the current state of the nonprofit sector around the world. It also provides insight into the sector's origin and purpose as well as the identifying important current trends. The note draws on numerous sources to provide a single resource for readers to gain understanding of this complex sector. The intended audience includes students, prospective professional leaders, those considering joining a board, consultants to the sector, or anyone wishing to learn more about the field.
Grossman, Allen S., and Naomi Greckol-Herlich. "Note on the Nonprofit Sector." Harvard Business School Background Note 308-033, April 2009. (Revised from original May 2008 version.)
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Mercy Corps, the world's 5th largest international relief and development agency, is at a turning point. The nonprofit's opportunities to grow and serve a larger number of beneficiaries are unprecedented. By looking at the unique relationship between headquarters and over 40 country offices, explores the question--is Mercy Corps well positioned to effectively and efficiently manage these new growth opportunities.
Grossman, Allen S., and Caroline Joan King. "Mercy Corps: Positioning the Organization to Reach New Heights (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 307-097, January 2007. (Revised December 2008.)
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In 2002, Guide Dogs for the Blind Association, the recognized world leader in the breeding and training of guide dogs, was in the midst of broadening its reach and providing additional mobility services. Chief Executive Geraldine Peacock was concerned that systemic problems, such as competition among organizations serving the visually impaired, program redundancy, and lack of optimum resource utilization this case prevented services from being delivered to many visually impaired people who needed them. Chronicles this nonprofit organization's attempt to leverage resources beyond traditional organizational boundaries and collaborate with competitors to deliver a wider range of services to its users.
Grossman, Allen S., and Aldo Sesia. "Innovation Corrupted: The Rise and Fall of Enron (TN) (A) and (B)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 307-024, September 2006.
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Grossman, Allen, Richard Elmore, and Caroline King. "Managing the Chicago Public Schools, Teaching Note." Harvard Business School Publishing Teaching Note, 2006.
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Austin, James E., Allen S. Grossman, Robert B. Schwartz, and Jennifer Suesse. "Managing at Scale in the Long Beach Unified School District." Harvard Business School Publishing Case, 2006.
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Austin, James E., Allen Grossman, and Jennifer Suesse. "Managing at Scale in the Long Beach Unified School District, Teaching Note." Harvard Business School Publishing Teaching Note, 2006.
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Childress, Stacey, Allen Grossman, and Caroline King. "Meeting New Challenges at the Aldine Independent School District." Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Case, 2005.
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Childress, Stacey, Allen S. Grossman, and Caroline King. "Meeting New Challenges at the Aldine Independent School District, Teaching Note." Harvard Business School Publishing Teaching Note, 2005.
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Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, wanted his organization to grow dramatically to reach thousands of poor and underserved children in Harlem. The agency ran a variety of successful social service programs throughout New York City that were separately funded and ran independently of each other. In 2000, Canada led the organization through an ambitious planning process, promising that within 10 years, its new integrated program would reach $46 million in revenues, serve 24,000 people, and expand to an area three times the size of its current zone. But the plan required the agency to change its management structure, measurement systems, and program goals drastically. How would the organization measure the impact of its work? Could such a system be measured? And how did the changes challenge the passionate directors who first established the component programs?
Childress, Stacey, Richard F. Elmore, and Allen Grossman. "Note on the PELP Coherence Framework." Harvard Business School Publishing Case, 2004.
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Grossman, Allen, Nancy D. Beaulieu, and Jennifer Suesse. "Compensation Reform at Denver Public Schools." Harvard Business School Publishing Case, 2004.
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Grossman, Allen, and Jennifer Suesse. "Compensation Reform at Denver Public Schools, Teaching Note." Harvard Business School Publishing Teaching Note, 2004.
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Elmore, Richard, Allen Grossman, and Modupe N Akinola. "Bristol City Schools (BCS), Teaching Note." Harvard Business School Publishing Teaching Note, 2004.
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Grossman, Allen, James P. Honan, and Caroline Joan King. "Learning to Manage with Data in Duval County Public Schools: Lake Shore Middle School (A)." Harvard Business School Publishing Case, 2004.
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Grossman, Allen, James P. Honan, and Caroline Joan King. "Learning to Manage with Data in Duval County Public Schools: Lake Shore Middle School (B)." Harvard Business School Publishing Case, 2004.
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Grossman, Allen, James P. Honan, and Caroline Joan King. "Learning to Manage with Data in Duval County Public Schools: Lake Shore Middle School (A) and (B) Case Series, Teaching Note." Harvard Business School Publishing Teaching Note, 2004.
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Patrick J. McGrath, the bishop of the healthy and growing San Jose diocese, is pioneering the use of long-term, business-like strategic planning to better deliver on his churches' core mission. The adopted plan addresses issues at the heart of how the diocese is organized and services are delivered. In addition, lay leaders and priests, for the first time, will be held accountable for their performance. Only dioceses facing critical financial crises have used strategic planning in the past. The planning process was arduous, and implementation across 52 churches will challenge all the leadership skills of the bishop and his management team. Can the culture of a 2000-year-old organization successfully merge with approaches to management developed by McKinsey?
Grossman, Allen S., and Daniel F. Curran. "EMCF: A New Approach at an Old Foundation (TN)." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 303-119, April 2003.
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Almost immediately upon being appointed CEO of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Steve McCormick undertakes a radical reorganization of this global institution. TNC is the largest and, by most measures, the most successful environment organization in the world, with revenues in excess of $650 million and a strong balance sheet. Nevertheless, after an in-depth analysis using the McKinsey-developed 7-S model, McCormick contends that the current structure, a U.S. organization with overseas offices, must be transformed to a truly global entity to fulfill its mission. Most of the staff and volunteers at TNC agree with the proposed change but protest its speed and scope. With the plan half implemented, McCormick must decide whether to slow down or forge ahead, knowing there are significant potential consequences to either decision. This case explores how a nonprofit measures success, how the content and process components of change must intersect in a carefully planned fashion, the tensions between the benefits of local autonomy, and the need for organization-wide standards and oversight.
Grossman, Allen S., and Jane Wei-Skillern. "Nature Conservancy, The." Harvard Business School Case 303-007, February 2003. (Revised March 2003.)
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Michael Bailin, president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF), embarked on a three-year effort to transform the foundation's grant-making in theory and practice. This case details his efforts to move from an "initiatives-based" approach in philanthropy to a focus on "institution and field building." Bailin felt that instead of simply devising better services for people in poor and disadvantaged communities, the foundation could bring these services to more people through better-run, more efficient, and more durable organizations. Yet, questions remain on whether EMCF can find the capabilities needed for the new model to work. Also, can EMCF succeed independently, or does a shift in thinking of this magnitude require a major restructuring in philanthropy, which would be outside the foundation's control?
Pallotta Team Works is a for-profit, privately owned company that produces multiday fundraising events for nonprofit organizations. Dan Pallotta, the 40-year-old CEO, founded the enterprise in 1992. The company has grown rapidly, having raised over $200 million for charities. As the boundaries between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors blur, this case provides an example of how a for-profit entrepreneurial approach and the market test where the lines between the two sectors are drawn. Pallotta and the company's aggressive style, plus the basic business model, generate a significant amount of controversy among nonprofit organizations and the press. Pallotta is outspoken about the merits of his business model, the appropriateness of his salary, and his company's marketing approach. He wants to increase total philanthropy in the United States. "How many ads for charity did you see on the Super Bowl this year," exclaims Pallotta.
Bain & Co., a consulting firm with a client list that ranges from entrepreneurial start-ups to global corporations, wanted to increase its involvement with nonprofit organizations. Rather than continuing to integrate the work into the existing organization, Bain created the Bridge Group, a nonprofit consulting entity that could draw upon the resources of Bain, maintain an independent practice and identity, and raise philanthropic capital. The CEO, Jeffrey Bradach, has taken a leave of absence from his position as professor at Harvard Business School to get the organization up and running. Success during the first year of operations has been beyond expectation, but the organization is facing a series of complex challenges if it is to achieve its ultimate goal of high impact to the nonprofit sector.
Grossman, Allen S., and John D. Kalafatas. "Bridgespan Group, The." Harvard Business School Case 301-011, October 2000. (Revised November 2000.)
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Documents the creation of a national before and after-school day care program aimed at bridging the gap between school and parents' work schedules. This high-growth, for-profit social enterprise organization operated in what was historically the domain of nonprofit or government sectors. Tensions emerge 1) pressure to grow and the need to maintain quality, 2) pursuit of a noble mission and a desire to create personal wealth, 3) creation of a national organization and a local program delivery capability, and 4) meeting investor expectations while maintaining the purity of the programs.
Grossman, Allen S., James E. Austin, Myra M. Hart, and Sharon Peyus. "Explore, Inc." Harvard Business School Case 300-011, September 1999. (Revised November 1999.)
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