LEAP UPDATES
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes. 
--Peter Drucker
Welcome to the archive of monthly Leap Updates from Mario Morino and Lowell Weiss. The final Leap Update was published in March of 2022.
Impetus to Change
Yes, it takes a village to raise a child. Sometimes it also takes an SOB. If David Hunter were a rapper rather than a performance whisperer, his stage name might have been Notorious SOB. (He’s a good friend, so we don’t have to beat around the bush.) His tough-love workshops are infamous for reducing participants to tears. A few years ago…
The Right Kind of Tears
Recently, we met with Jennifer Hoos Rothberg, the dynamic executive director of the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, to discuss how funders can pay careful heed—not just lip service—to what their grantees need for improving performance. EFCT is deeply admired by its grantees for practicing what they preach about supporting their pursuit of high performance. EFCT has taken a “fewer, deeper, longer” approach that allows them to…
Playing Well with Others
Meetings aren’t usually the stuff of spotlighting. But the twice-yearly confab of Playworks, an organization that promotes safe and healthy play, demonstrated not just what’s possible when a high-performance nonprofit interacts in a high-performance way with high-performance funders. It gave us a glimpse of what it might look like if there were a whole ecosystem of high-performance funders engaging with each other for the benefit of grantees and the families they serve.
Go Fast and Go Far
Our colleague Patty Stonesifer, Martha’s Table’s brilliant CEO, loves to quote this famous African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Last week, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF) went public with a bold move that may prove that going fast and going far are not mutually exclusive. EMCF CEO Nancy Roob and Board Chair Larry Clark announced that the foundation is going to…
Preparing for the Unknown
Just prior to celebrating the American Thanksgiving with our families, we experienced the professional version of the holiday when we hosted a convening of the Leap Ambassadors Community in DC. We are deeply grateful that so many of the Leap Ambassadors, thinkers and doers committed to high performance, made the time to come together for relationship- and community-building. And although we certainly didn’t plan it this way, the timing of the event allowed us to work together to start to unpack what the earthquake election in the States means for the people and communities we serve. The first thing we concluded is that…
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!”