As I have written before, it seems to me that in general, non-profit organizations are trapped in the shadow of the for-profit world.
Non-profit organizations are structured in a way that mirrors their for-profit counterparts. A structure that has been honed over the past few hundred years to provide the perfect balance between servicing the market and providing profit.
For-profit organizations generally have some some sort of Board that answers solely to investors. A CEO/President that answers solely to the Board, a C-suite (COO, CFO, CMO etc) that answers to the CEO, Managers that report to the C-suite, and so on. The final measure of this reporting structure really comes down to the Profit & Loss statement.
Now of course there are many exceptions to this but for the majority of ‘big business’ in our society, this is the way.
Non-profits find themselves in a situation where they have a similar reporting structure except the driving metric for the system, the P&L statement, has been removed. In fact it has been aggressively disrupted.
“You shall NOT make money!”
A very smart individual recently said something to me that makes a lot of sense. The driving force of non-profits is …
Passion!
This is entirely true. Non-profiter’s as a whole have all kinds of passion. Now we need to design a system not for rewarding profit, a system that rewards passion.
