Posts by Beth Owens

Over the past few months, more than 50 top nonprofit thought leaders and practitioners convened by the Leap of Reason team have been working hard to produce a much-needed definition of the term “high-performance organization.” We hope our common—but not least-common-denominator—definition will provide a solid foundation for subsequent efforts to design ways to make high performance the norm in the social and public sectors.

To highlight core concepts of high performance, we’ve started to build a gallery of short video clips featuring courageous, outspoken nonprofit leaders. Here are some of the blunt messages you’ll see these leaders deliver:

The first systematic effort to shift the federal government’s focus from “what was done with public funds” to “what was accomplished was the the 1993 U.S. Program Results Act (GPRA). Unfortunately, the pioneering efforts of Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have not yet produced a major change in how the federal government allocates taxpayer dollars. And yet, we’re now starting to believe the lumbering Ship of State might actually turn.

You’ve heard about the ways in which e-learning is transforming higher education. But we are convinced that e-learning will play a role in changing how we transfer and access knowledge in all aspects of life. Check out the new report Just in Time: The Beyond-the-Hype Potential of E-Learning to learn more.

To avoid majoring on “yesterday’s problems,” we all need to observe and absorb how new technology for collecting, analyzing, and applying information can and will influence our sector in the coming years.

Early feedback from attendees of the After the Leap indicate the conference was a success in bringing together high-performance-minded leaders and promoting a feeling of connection and community. Videos and slides from the keynote and plenaries are now available.

Courageous leaders who want to help improve the impact of their own organizations and be part of a movement to increase the performance of the social and public sectors are coming together on December 3-4 for After the Leap conference.

If our sector is to make more than incremental progress, we simply must find a way to inspire and support high performance and make it the norm, rather than a blue-moon rarity.

If leaders want to solve rather than just salve big social challenges, they must be humble enough to take a hard look in the mirror and courageous enough to reinvent…