Relentless
Our subject line reflects the title of the passionate and personal speech Mario just finished giving at The City Club of Cleveland, based heavily on his work with Venture Philanthropy Partners. He’s handling Q&A right now, so we appropriated his email account to send out this message.
We’re biased of course, but we think the former high school baseball player with the middling batting average hit it out of the park!
We hope the speech will be the opening salvo in a cross-sector movement to advance high performance as the norm for nonprofit and public-sector institutions.
True to form, Mario pulled no punches:
- “We funders, board members, and civic leaders should be supporting nonprofit leaders to build strong, high-performance organizations. Instead, we cause them to think incrementally—month to month and hand to mouth.”
- “We often say we’re focused on results. But really what we’re doing is demanding more information on results without paying enough attention to what leaders actually need in order to produce those results.”
- “Our society will have less money for services. And we will have more demand for services from a broader swath of the population. Just imagine how hard the funding decisions are going to become! What will we fund? What will we drop? How will we decide?”
- “Nonprofit leaders and their public-sector counterparts have to summon the courage to seek high performance. Forget your damned funders. Do it for yourself.”
You can read the “as prepared” draft of Mario’s speech now. On Monday, you’ll be able to watch the video here. We’d be grateful if you’d share these links via social media (for Twitter, we use #leapofreason).
—Lowell Weiss and Cheryl Collins, co-editors, Leap of Reason
P.S. Consistent with the themes of Leap of Reason and “Relentless,” Mario and the team welcome your unvarnished feedback on the speech to help with our own learning and improvement. Send it our way at info@leapofreason.org.
Quotes From Leaders Like You
“You’re taking someone else’s money to get into somebody else’s life to try to make a difference. You better be showing you can make a difference!”
“Stories substituting for facts is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me!”
“Any school in the country can do this. And it breaks my heart that we’re not [all] doing this!”
“Every day, you have to say, ’How can we do this more efficiently and more effectively?’ It’s in our DNA.”
“Through a process of self-reflection, our board members asked themselves fundamental questions: How can we improve? How can we make a greater impact?”
“You have to have undying passion for the population you’re serving. We can spend time patting ourselves on the back for the 85 percent of the kids who are doing really well in our program. But we need to be as concerned about the 15 percent who aren’t succeeding and learn how we can improve for them.”
“Managing to outcomes is not about simply counting things or gathering information. And it is not about satisfying funders. It is an internal effort aimed at figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so that the organization can provide the best possible services to its clients”