High Performance
We all had to learn and grow. We had to build a new organizational culture with new expectations and performance standards, new ways of working. But the payoff was incredible.
--David E.K. Hunter
“Relentless: Investing in Leaders Who Stop at Nothing in Pursuit of Greater Social Impact“
Mario Morino, April 27, 2012 Mario Morino’s City Club of Cleveland speech in which he describes the social and economic tsunamis that are now hitting our shores and eroding social services in America. Instead of leveling across-the-board “haircuts” to all organizations, he argues, we should go much deeper with our support for those leaders who are relentless in pursuit of high performance for those they serve.
David Hunter’s Working Hard—and Working Well is number two on Amazon’s list of best sellers in the “Nonprofit Organizations & Charities” and is drawing praise from a wide variety of reviewers.
“The ‘Performance Whisperer’ Speaks“
View the free playback of the Perform Well webinar with David Hunter, author of Working Hard—and Working Well, as well as First Place for Youth CEO Sam Cobbs.
“Reports and Lessons From the First 10 Years“
Bill Ryan and Barbara Taylor, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, September 2013 A highly readable report on how the Clark Foundation supports its grantees to improve their performance and how the foundation assesses its own performance.
Collins, James C., Boulder, CO: J. Collins, 2005 “We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become “more like a business.” Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?”
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap—And Others Don’t
Collins, James C., New York: Harperbusiness, 2001 “Start with 1,435 good companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that became great. Now here’s how you can do it too. Lessons on eggs, flywheels, hedgehogs, buses, and other essentials of business that can help you transform your company.”
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Davenport, Thomas H., and Jeanne G. Harris, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007 “This book unleashed a worldwide movement in organizations wanting to harness their data for competitive advantage. It describes organizations that use business intelligence and analytics not only to improve operations, but also to compete but also to compete more effectively.”
Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Leader’s Guide to Getting Results
Green, Alison, and Jerry Hauser, Washington, DC: Management Center, 2009 “In the second edition of this “Management 101” manual, The Management Center’s Jerry Hauser and Alison Green offer usable, step-by-step guidance on how nonprofit leaders can get great results.”
“Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail“
Kotter, J. P., Harvard Business Review, March-April 1995 “Guiding change may be the ultimate test of a leader—no business survives over the long term if it can’t reinvent itself. But, human nature being what it is, fundamental change is often resisted mightily by the people it most affects: those in the trenches of the business. Thus, leading change is both absolutely essential and incredibly difficult.”
Mission Impact: Breakthrough Strategies for Nonprofits
Sheehan, Robert M., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010 “A guide for designing and carrying out a strategy development process for a nonprofit organization.”
Quotes From Leaders Like You
“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”
“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.”
“Through a process of self-reflection, our board members asked themselves fundamental questions: How can we improve? How can we make a greater impact?”
“Every day, you have to say, ’How can we do this more efficiently and more effectively?’ It’s in our DNA.”
“Any school in the country can do this. And it breaks my heart that we’re not [all] doing this!”
“Stories substituting for facts is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me!”
“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!”