The Clock is Ticking for America's Nonprofits

How to Lead a Creative Life, is the title of Rick Tetzeli's article on Martin Scorsese in this month's FAST COMPANY magazine. I've been thinking this summer and fall on this topic, leading a creative life, as I spent hundreds of hours learning to build a website, to create graphics, and understand how really important words become when you are publishing into the world wide web. Now that I have officially launched www.OpenSky-wi.net, I have gone "viral" with my creativity and philosophy, and was relieved to read Martin's own thoughts about creativity that you share with a larger audience. For me, the audience may only be as large as my family and friends. (Oh, please, please let this not be so, please at least have a few hundred near-strangers check it out, and like it.) For Martin, it is the entire movie and entertainment industry.

And surprise! This amazingly successful director still panics about deadlines, worries about funding, whether his supervisors will approve, whether he will ever get to create another movie after the one he is creating now (like if this one is a flop). Will his vision get into the final product, how does he say "yes" at the right time or "no" when he should or needs to?

Reading through Tetzeli's piece, it struck me again how the concept of great leadership, even good leadership trails through all walks of life, down every corridor, in every gathering, for every great endeavor that people push to complete, to attain. Several of the qualities of leadership that we've already talked about in our blog, on our website, or in our videos, are true of Scorsese. Respect the past. Appreciate the contributions of those who have come before you. Understand yourself, as an individual, as a human being and as a leader. Trust your confidants. Understand power and how to fight, contain and use it. When needed, understand how to participate in the institution. Defy the pressures of others when you must, when you know your vision, your value, your course is correct, is best. Most importantly, develop other outlets for your creativity, so you don't burn out.

Creativity needs to be shared, challenged, played out in more than one space. Which is why I learned to build cartoons on the way to creating videos, tools for boards and leadership retreats and workshops.

It is the season of creativity. For the nonprofit world, creativity may be the only means we have of meeting the challenge of 12 hours to save the world; that's the average number of hours any one board member spends in a year on the efforts of your nonprofit.

Thank you, FAST COMPANY, for inspiring me one more time. The Clock is Ticking.

90 Days Later we have a Website --- 3 months!

Up until this summer/fall, I was used to suggesting, emailing, pleading, begging and haranguing tech staff to add things to the website of what ever organization at which I was working at the time. And then........

I started my open entity, and suddenly was faced with needing to develop a website. Being conscious of the cost of these things, and being wedded to the "free" tech support I was receiving with my Mac extended warranty, I decided to build the website for OpenSky-wi on my "own" using their weekly personal project sessions and their IWeb, etc, programming. Which meant, of course, that it would be my fingers and my brain staying up late, getting lost for weeks inside shapes and animation, learning about hyperlinks and all sorts of other connections for which I needed new contracts and new user codes and passwords.

I've been trying for weeks to make the acquaintance I-Movie and YouTube, but could never become friends with either of them, though sometimes they tolerated me enough to let me slide in the door to stand awkwardly in the dark lobby.

90 days, 3 months or 3 of the 12 days we have to save the world each year, the Website is launched, and I'm only finding 4 or 5 kinks each day. Of course I will eventually have it hosted with a stronger server, but I am happy now that it is up and running, out there in the public space for everyone's comments, criticisms and thoughts of "what is she thinking about?"

What I came to realize is when you are building a new organization and you are the builder, you move from being a private person always presenting the "company" to others, to having to really open up and present yourself. Even if you are a leader of one or two or three, you still have to get up each morning and lead the charge to the next hillside.

And that is what I have found, building a website or building an organization is a series of hills that you must scale, "take", and then there is another hill, and another hill. A helicopter doesn't show up out there somewhere at the edge of your wilderness and provide you a free ride to milk and honey or paradise or even a building on Park Avenue. And some days you can only see the hill behind you and maybe the base of the hill ahead of you, and some days there is only fog, Then every once in a while you scale a hill, and it's a bit higher and harder, but once on top, you realize you can see the next three hills out there, can actually see there is a path to the other side of where you are trying to arrive.

So, many apologies for any of my past behaviors to any of my past tech people at those other places of employment.

And now, I can actually get back to blogging and creating public will to change the world.

Have a good day, take a long walk and smell the fall air. I know that is where I am off to right now!

You Chose to Live and Face the New Day

Again, I heard that phrase this morning. "Some nonprofits should die. In a business environment, bad managers and poor operations will die naturally. So should nonprofits."

Those of you who have read some of my work know that phrase drives me wild. Because attached to it is the implied or stated introduction or completion --- it's someone else's problem and no one in a community has the role of "management police" --- no one is minding the store for the bad managers. There is no answer to the query on where does the responsibility lay, to call out those who are "dying" because of bad management, not because their cause is poor or their mission is wrong or those for whom they are striving are not deserving enough?

I happen to believe that there is a difference between organizations that are "not-for-profit" and are "for-profit", a very big and distinct difference. For profit is clear --- we are opening a business in order to make money for ourselves, to make a profit for any investors, and to focus on the bottom line. We are employers, but we are also profit seekers.

What is the bottom line for non profits? What is the profit they seek? It should be set down in their mission and purpose, and these are what should draw individuals and supporters to their cause --- to change the world, to provide services and hope and opportunities that help others lift themselves out of whatever peril they face. So, we measure the profit of a NFP on the value they are creating for those they state they are helping. And to honor the dollars that have been given for this purpose, we can't afford an attitude of "they'll die if they aren't managed well."

So, if you chose today to live another day as a manager or board member of a not-for-profit, then face what really is going on in the organization and don't let it die from neglect, ignorance, exhaustion, or creaking old bones.

Kick Your Way Out of That Silo

If you have rolled out of bed and are now out the door and crawling across the surface of life, if you are moving in any direction, please make sure it is forward. If you are heading in the right direction, then hand-pull by hand-pull, knee by knee, you will get someplace. If you are facing the right way, you may get to that space your cranium once dreamed of seeing.

But we can't get there alone. The greatest drain I'm seeing among leaders of nonprofits is the loneliness of what they have begun to believe is their personal long distance run to nowhere. The very scope, complexity, or continuous build-up of tasks and roles, take their toll in a growing isolation and building of a tall narrow silo. The energy necessary to even think of how they will tackle one more activity blocks out the sun, and rather than shift those activities to others, they just say they have to do more. They lose the very voice their members need from them, the voice of collaboration, health and willingness to let go of being in charge of day to day.

Kick out of the silo. Spend part of each day considering who would be helpful for each task or responsibility that must be fulfilled in the next month, season, year. Ask people to support something, ask people to join in answering a need. Make a list and then give away the sole role. Make it a goal that at the end of one month you'll have brought 3 volunteers into the organization who are tackling one or more tasks. Make a goal, an audacious goal to demand that you learn, and the organization, learns to work in an entirely different model of service and leadership; set the goal that at the end of the year there will be 50 new volunteers working to meet the objectives and purpose, doing real work and bringing strength. This new model will leave you able to again be the valued and astute leader, and not the isolated overpaid drudge you've been dragging around on your back for too long.

And you can begin to remember why you took that job in the first place. Because you were excited at what were the possibilities. And this is the real possibility - each person who joins with you brings 6 opportunities along with them.

Be aware. And dare to be well.

10,000 Steps or 10,000 Hours - Either Way You Better be moving

10,000 steps a day is what we're being told is the key to health and long life. 10,000 hours, per Gladwell, is the key to achieving excellence in any one pursuit. Both numbers relate to our need to be active and focused and not give up after a few days or a few hours, a few months or a few years.

10,000 hours at 50 hours per week (for those who jump in deep) equals 200 weeks, with time off for vacation, illness, family breaks, etc, that is approximately 4 years to become exceptional. Having worked with staff and leaders around the country, I was slightly amused to do the math and find it met what I'd been saying - it takes four years to turn around an organization and transition from new leader to accepted leader to appreciated and admired leader, both as an individual and/or as an organization. Given these facts, we all need to consider and address the debilitating drain on our nonprofit human service system by the constant turnover in staff and lack of consistency in boards.

Start today to assess where you are going and how you are going to get there. Plan out how you are going to spend the next 10,000 hours on your purpose in order to bring exceptional services or outcomes to those whom you are hoping and planning to delight --- your customers, friends, funders and staff.

Put on the jogging shoes, the t-shirt and get moving! I'll see you at the next intersection.

Leaders Buiild Bridges for and to Other Leaders

How do you keep your board members focused during the "12 hours to save the world" on strategies, planning, and funding development outside the office and away from sticking their hands around operational management issues?

I saw this question on another professional network site, or a close version to my statement anyway.

The short answer for me is that honesty is the best policy, just tell it like it is, with good job and responsibility descriptions, clarity in the bylaws and policies and even good graphics that hang around the walls during meetings.

But if the staff leadership cannot come up with real action plans/volunteer opportunities for the board to grab hold of around issues of strategic outcomes and funding and friends development, then there are only two options:

1. Staff leadership has to spend the time to do so AND/OR pay for help from mentors and wise folks to teach them the ropes OR

2. Staff leadership just has to change. Well, in effect, they have to change anyway, either through #1 or through this option, #2 leader-out and another leader-in. And this is painful even when it turns out to the best outcome.

Remember --- you want to be the leader and that is why you applied, competed for and made it to the role of leader.

So learn to lead in many different ways. True, you are not the chair of the board, but you are the guide -- the bridge between the board and the organization, just as the board should be the bridge between the organization and the larger community, business, schools, providers, peers, advocates, funders, and services.

Take on the really productive challenge of bringing meaningful learning and action opportunities for the board, understand why they joined the organization, how they want to focus their time, insert hope and recognition and GET YOUR ORGANIZATION'S name and adventures in the news -- in the media.

If you have things happening on the outside, and if you bring strategic planning and decision making opportunities to your board, so they are busy, engaged and believe their 12 hours each year are really productive and meaningful and they see the progress in both dollars and recognition/reputation --- well, they really won't have time to put their hands inside NOR probably think they need to.

A board that senses that things are going well, that reports are presented and information provided on a timely and meaningful basis, and their time and ideas and energy is solicited for meaningful progress and success for the organization is a board that doesn't begin blurring the edges of roles and responsibilities.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral - 12 Hours to Save the World

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Yes....I had an amazing thought this morning as I replayed images from several sessions as an observer of another organization's board meetings over the past year.

Why do board meetings sometimes feel like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral? What are the particular conditions that create the tension, the waiting, the undercurrents, the glancing to see if there is the possibility of an ambush from someone on the sidelines, an unknown action from an unanticipated supporting character, perhaps even someone you took for a supernumerary (one with no lines in a movie) until they unloaded the double barrel shotgun.

Here are a few possibilities from the director to motivate the actors:

• "History" between the lead characters and others involved

• The peccadilloes of the main characters

• Misrepresentation of the facts of each side

• The hero got his job from whom he knew and not what he'd done

• The challenger(s) wanted someone else to have the job

• A bad hair day

• The level of drinking done by any or all of the characters the night before

• A debt owed to someone on the street or in the back room

• Rumors

• What the wife, husband, partner said just before the character left for the saloon

And here are some possibiliites on how the shootout will go down

• Hero forgets to load his gun in the excitement of getting to the corral

• Hero arrives late, as usual, only this time he walks into the full ambush, something he just didn't see coming

• Folks on main street are tired of the whole thing and just step back and watch or don't even show up for the event

• Hero has planned for this possibility and has extra deputies on hand to shout down the hub-bub

• The judge behind the scenes issues an arrest warrant for either the hero(s) or the challenger(s) or everyone

• A thunderstorm or a snow storm forces the show-down to be postponed

• At the last minute, a witness shows up with evidence that it is someone in the other town who has been causing all the rumors and lies and misunderstandings and everyone goes off to ambush the next town

• The hero is wounded and has to retire to recover; if he ever will awaits to be known

• The challenger is wounded and slinks off with his followers to the back of the corral to whisper and plot again

• The challenger proves the hero is the bad guy, runs him out of town, and takes the day

• The hero survives being wounded because he came prepared to have an open dialogue with any and all and was able to be both apologetic for any misunderstandings and to be strong and "leader-like" to the crowd; i.e. came with proof, with a plan, and with all the spreadsheets and secrets laid out in full disclosure AND with a mighty set of friends.

Well, we want to all choose the last bullet. But if we're not sure how we're going to actually get out of the predicatment of the O.K. Corral, we need help to keep our jobs and keep our town alive and in-tact.

You did want to be the hero, didn't you? Why else would you take on the job of leading?!!!!!

12 Hours to Save the World - if you're not driving drunk

In this episode we're focusing on actions or nonactions of boards at meetings.

We're talking about boards in such a way to remind all of us, board members or staff members, to stay awake and do not drink and drive. Or fall asleep at the wheel.

Admit it --- some folks actually feel a bit elevated, to another plain from the rest of us, by titles and "positions" and that alone can lead to a slight feeling of tipsiness with the "power" of being board or leader.

So staying sober and awake is imperative! Board and leaders are not royalty; they are the servants of the organization --- servant leaders.

FIRST: You cannot save the world if you are drunk

--- unless, and this is such as slight slim chance that it's not really acceptable --- unless you were Luke Skywalker and you'd had to get completely sloushed before you'd agree to get into that little fighter plane at the end of the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV) --- and yet were still able to aim your weapons to blow up the Deathstar. But that is impossible! He may have been high listening to voices, but he was also sober. And he was blowing something up.

Ah, but wait, what about Independence Day? Randy Quaid's broken-down fighter pilot raving about his abduction by aliens is always drunk --- and he saved the world with his kamakazie plunge into the alien's vessel at the end of the movie. Okay, he may have been drunk when he volunteered, but they poured gallons of hot coffee down him before he took off.

And there is a basic point which we need to make here

--- plowing into a brick wall sober or drunk to save the world is what happens to staff with organizations, not board members. Board members are seldom seen taking on the world through a form of professional suicide. In fact, they jump ship for all kinds of reasons to suit their time and pleasure. And look stunned to the point of turning into a brick wall when courageous and terrified staff members try to warn them that the ship has a leak and something must be done immediately or it is going down.

If it is a slow leak, the ship can be listing for a long time before it sinks, it might even come to rest on the water without being completely submerged, therefore still appearing to be working. But it is not --- the purpose of a ship is to sail, not to do a slightly believable job of acting like it has not sunk because it's hit rock bottom.

But how do you know if the board is driving drunk? (sailing drunk?)

Point one: Many boards operate as though they are slightly inebriated --- all the time, but would be shocked if you said they were behaving as though drunk. Watch this carefully. Remember, the first sign of a true drunk is how very carefully he attempts to act as though he is not drunk. A good sign would be how much hilarious laughter and joking goes on in relationship to the dramatic drop in organizational income --- if these two variables are moving in opposite directions, then the board is most definitely sailing/driving drunk. Othewise, how could there be laughter in the face of disaster.

Point two: Most boards are not so sloshed that they can't sit up straight and get their food from their plate into their mouths, or recognize when they are asked a question or need to raise their hand to vote. But sloshed enough that any inclination to ask a question that would put anyone else in an awkward position to answer --- well they just don't do it because it would ruin the atmosphere of comradery at the party. Comradery must be maintained at all times; anything else is just not acceptable!

Point three: Their slight inebriation leads them into a dangerous state that borders between collusion and neglect; collude to keep the atmosphere supportive, neglect and go with the flow because it means the meeting will end on an up note, will not go beyond the set ending time, and they can get out of there without feeling responsible. If comradery increases as income and staff decrease, then be assured that your board is sailing drunk.

Point four: They give a good performance of grave concern at the appropriate points in the meeting when dollars are being discussed, but quickly jump back into a state of high comradery with a joke or two about money. And accept and are relieved at whatever explanation is given by the finance committee or director. Whew! Made it through that one, they are thinking, and remove their sober masks for bright smiling faces. Yes!!! They are driving drunk.

Point five: They are basically convivial, want to maintain an act of friendship with the others around the table. There are very few who join a board to create awkward, painful, embarrassing moments for others. Anyone acting like anything less than politically-correct professionals at the board meeting are given a wide berth or treated "extra-special" but their stated concerns or questions are also treated "as extra-special" and therefore not truly taken into account. These professional board members in today's atmosphere have been trained to treat outsiders like tolerated but necessary pets.

Point six: At the end of the meeting, board members suddenly and decisively all split, not to be seen again until the next meeting they make. And as every staff leader knows, the longer the time between meetings the shorter the memories of board members as to what was going to take place between the meetings. If they really do not bring back up an unanswered question about a critical issue (if it was asked) from a previous meeting, then yes they are driving drunk.

If there are problems with an organization why doesn't the board act responsibly?

Because the lights are still on, nice lunches are still servced, and the CEO gave a hell of a presentation about something. And everyone is being exceptionally nice.

Point seven: These 12 to 15 to 30 individuals who by law are fiscially and legally accountable for the organization, bound to ante up or make public their participation if something goes terribly wrong. But people don't join boards thinking they will have to answer questions from the press as to why their organization hasn't paid payroll taxes for four years or why they did not know their finance director was embezzoling $ 300,000 from the bank accounts over a couple of years. They join because, well, well they join for a lot of reasons, most of them not because their neighbor asked them, or their company assigned them or their daughter begged them or their boss invited them, ect. Anyway, they certainly do not believe that any board they join would actually be a board where something bad happens or the board has to make difficult and potentially threatening decisions to and for someone(s).

Remember Potential Board Members: Before you join, ask a lot of questions that you will hesitate to ask once you become slightly inebriated by the third board meeting.

Remember Effective Staff Leaders: Encourage the asking of awkward questions, prepare yourself for them, and insist that they are answered. Try at all costs to keep your board sober.

Okay, there is a SECOND OPTION, if not driving/sailing drunk: You can't save the world if you are asleep at the wheel.

Point eight: Last year nonprofits of $200K to $8M to $30M blew away in the wind in a matter of months in this country, and their boards all stated they were shocked, stunned, had no idea. At least those were board members who could be found, could be reached. In one notorious case there were only two individuals who would even admit they were a board member of $23M nonprofit service-provider organization. The supposed other eight members of this board were so asleep, that they'd fallen off the bus when it reached the desert and had drfited away when they woke up somewhere else. No one could even remember their names.

DECLARATION: Don't let your friends drive drunk, don't let them fall asleep at the wheel (is it from boredom or meeting that go on too long with nothing of substance:

Point nine: Please observe your board carefully........If the entire party is inebriated, none of them are in a state to make far reaching, thoughtful and integral decisions for the longitudinal health of the group, the committee, the membership and the organization. They readily agree to what seems to be the quickest way to a decision OR continually put off making the decision. And after a bit more drinking in their relief that they are going to get through one more gathering without the place going up in flames, they as a group will excitedly applaud the performer who leaps up with enthusiasm and assurance that all will be well. If this is the case, take away their keys and find a driver, and find new board members.

Conclusion:

The lights will eventually go out on this group. Because they are on a slow course towards death. It dosen't matter that they are good people, a goodly people we might even say. If I could figure out a reason this happens to boards of nonprofits and businesses all over the country and the world, well.....well, I think I have figured out the reasons, but that doesn't help us with the solution.

Boards are composed of human beings who for some reason agree to serving on a board of directors for some organization, one of thousands of nonprofit organizations that exist for whatever purpose you can imagine. There is a mission. There is a purpose. Whether they know and believe and are ambassdors for the mission and purpose is a novel unto itself.

Solution: Honesty demands we don't allow folks to drive drunk or sleep at the wheel. That means ourselves and others.

This requires that today in whatever capacity we have as staff leaders and board members, we clean away all the verbage, all the premier taglines, and avoid discussions around issues that do not pertain to saving the ship. We need to be open to ideas, and understand that the winds of hope are not the same as the winds of delusion.

We need to agree that the buck really does stop with the top staff leader, and the chair or president of the board has the only role that can "call" staff leadership on their actions, so they need to do so when it is necssary.

Boards must remember that they are only interim stewards of an organization's health and morality, that they must leave an organization healthier than when they joined or they have broken faith with all the other stewards who came before them.

Board work is serious, and must be approached with eyes wide open in the 12 hours of serious work we share together each year. Set goals and objectives within the board and call each other out on meeting these g/o's.

And finally, appreciate, in fact relish, those outsiders who ask questions. Because we need to know we can answer them.

12 Hours to Save the World

Quatro --- Feed your troops. An army does not travel well on an empty stomach. Feed your staff, with food for thought, with opportunities for learning and training, with chances to strutt and show their stuff, and with real physical rewards and signs of appreciation.

Stanley Bing said it best in Sun Tzu was a Sissy, feed your staff food, splurge for a lunch, a dinner, pizza or cookies, but make sure that your staff is fed first. I worked for someone in the past who never fed staff, never took staff to lunch, individually, as a group or as the entire team. And all suffered, quietly and in confusion, that an individual who made three times the salary of 90% of the staff never expended personal funds to thank folks for their sacrifices.

So others fed staff.

Stanley Bing is very much a man, so this idea of pleasure or rational in feeding others isn't just a woman thing.

For some reason, full of chargrin, I have become attracted to the Food Channel. It may be the slowness of summer, the 100 degree weather outside, or a lull in work coming to OpenSky-wi, and the knowledge that the bank account is dwindling, or a combination of it all. Whatever, the mix has led me to an incredible desire to think about food. Not cupcake wars, but big cooking challenges between teams of chefs and their sous and prep chefs, going hard-on to build the best meals for picky, prickly and pointedly-persnickity judges. I find myself considering how I would approach the challenges, what I would do with the various food substances that appear in the mystery boxes, whether I could come up with an eggs benedict without a recipe or handle the pressure of things catching on fire that shouldn't, people saying your food was wrong or tasted awful and watching your hope bleed away as well as the juice of lambchop before you could get it to table.

Then it struck me --- these restaurant and cooking wars remind me of grant submittal season, the up to the last minute deadlines, the scramble to compose a proposal that meets the requirements handed to you in the RFP, is structured as required, and fits on the page limit with the budget limits and all those forms and supportive material. Points are awaiting and every element needs to be completed as precisely as possible.

And yet somehow taking all those precise elements in consideration, what drives us to complete each proposal and win our own version of the restaurant wars are the individual ingredients and grit and creativity in our presented solution to the challenge in question.

We lay out those individual pages in the RFP and get out our magnifiying lenses and go over line by line --- the only way we actually can see between the lines is with this magnifying glass, and we begin to see where there is flexibility, where we have space to wiggle, and a great heart comes to us the creators and a slight thrill goes through us.

The menu --- I love this part. Lay out the entire proposal on a tight spreadsheet, and get it all on just two pages so it makes sense and then you can build a meal that becomes a feast.

And then your proposal is funded and you are feeding many, many people.

That's the best result of restaurant wars.

Let me hear from you if you want to talk grant submittal via restuarant wars!!!

Now go eat and feed someone.

12 Hours to Save the World -- Dos Tres

Grasp the Hands of Others and Hold Tight

We exist as leaders individually, working to meet our mission, ensure clients and peers and customers have opportunities for full lives in recovery. Every waking moment we are steering a course to protect our agency and staff from financial irregularities. We give quiet advice and we cross our fingers behind our backs.

We keep our heads up, our chins out, and our eyes level, whether in the office, at board meetings, in conversations with our staff, immersed in critical review with our finance team, in public, in partnership conversations, with funders, with evaluators, with management and auditors.

We stay late, we turn out the lights, our staff have our personal number and use it, and often so do our volunteers. Our board members are treated as valuable and as friends, regardless of what we initially thought of each of them. We talk them up to our staff and we talk our staff up to our board. We build bridges and protect the fragile until they are not longer vulnerable.

We smile, we're gracious, we ask for support for the organization, dollars for our programs, and friendships for our mission and purposes. We ensure there is enthusiasm in the building, that hope is a regular resident, and that staff and volunteers know they are contributors to saving the world through their connection and work with you and the organization.

We may lead at the masthead and but yet we need to have our feet on the ground and everything we do and create must feel as though it is the work of many hands, hearts and minds.

But our dark secret is the number of nights we drive home after everyone else has left the office, or late after an evening meeting, our hearts thick, our tears streaming quietly down our face as we live with the slight and constant fear of failing. Late nights over the laptop, spreadsheets blurring, the weight of our mission, our board's confidence, the validity and viability of our programs, balancing time and constraints, funding proposals, business and strategic plans, delicately stepping through landminds and pushing through barriers, we hold success all too often in our own ten fingers, in our exhuasted brain.

Who shares this need of a constant state of readiness and strategizing better than other leaders of nonprofits, all facing in today's environment the same strictures, the very ones listed above in bloody detail? Did I mention medicaid regs, tightening foundation funding, on top of escalating details and governmental shortfalls?

So here is the third suggestion --- find two other leaders of nonprofits in your region and form an informal executive director support group. Yes. Start with coffee and a bit of a chat, before building up to the big stuff. Do come up with agreements among each other, even if tongue in cheek on confidentiality, but definitely recognizing that what is shared over coffee stays with the coffee. Don't pick just anyone. If you are the leader you are used to sniffing out and instinctively knowing who clicks and who doesn't with you. It could be like a "co-op" of baring one's soul and building up another's.

You don't want this to be a co-op of fifty. You are not asking for personal advice or who is giving out money this week. You sincerely want to build friendships with folks who can understand when a board member gives you a headache, when your valuable staff member begins to get flacky, and when you wonder if you are losing your nerve in this buisness.

It's your own clique you're putting together. And if you are new in this field, under 5 years, you must have already wondered about the leaders in your community who know each other well, who cluster together at meetings or share information behind the scene. Somehow they know something that you don't, are comfortable with funders when you are not.

You need this little clique of your own and so do those two or three others you can catch the eye of at a collabortive meeting. Think of something, quick. What little topic can you come up with to give a purpose to a meeting. Or just say to one or two of them, let's have lunch.

Yeah, start it simple, but keep it going. Good things take time to develop, but you know already that the first step is the most critical one you can take. Becuase you move forward.

Good luck and email me if you'd like to start one on-line.

Dos --Eipihany - Growing a Backbone

Eipihany - That "ah ha" moment when you feel you have found the last piece of the puzzle and now see the whole picture.

This is in thanks to Carolyn of Iowa, who rather dramatically drew out their board's organizational structure around the thick trunk of a plant --- and it struck me that the trunk is the backbone, and nourishment travels up and down the trunk from the roots to the leaves and from the leaves to the roots. But if something happens to the trunk -- if that backbone of the tree is injured there is a grave chance of death, or stunted growth or lingering poor health.

We need to grow backbones for our boards --- for the organizational leadership. In my work with nonprofit boards the element that begins to erode over time and neglect is their backbone . Organizational structure is the backbone of strong leaderhsip and capacity to meet mission and purpose.

A strong backbone ensures that the inner workings of the nonprofit are protected from harm, that there is flexibility in difficult times and a capacity to build resources and store nourishment during good weather and seasons.

A backbone keeps us honest. It stores and feeds knowledge throughout our entire blood and nerve system. If the backbone is severed we either die, become paralysed or if we are lucky, through rehabilitation, which may take years, we are brought back to functioning, partial or nearly full. But we are never quite the same again.

When we go long periods of ignoring this backbone, when we find ourselves actually relieved that our boards have not grown backbones, then we are acting rashly and without responsibliity to our organization.

Let's start building our backbones!

12 Ways to Save the World ---- UNO

Read one book this month --- I'd like to say this week but my hopefulness does not extend to being wildly optimistic. So read a book this month to change the future of your organization, to save the future.

Writing to Change the World by Mary Pipfer, the newest book from the author of Reviving Ophelia and The Middle of Everywhere. I'm half way through and excited, because Mary is challenging me, my mind, my thought process. She is reminding me that most of us humans do not use 10% of our brains during the day, and maybe only 5% at night.

She is reminding me of a truism I remember occasionally, and what many folks experience through meditation, that we are not using out time wisely, we are not thinking deeply, we are not contemplating the world around us, under us and through which we are traveling for the most part like sleep walkers. We need to do this.

Do this now. Read a book that sounds like it could help you as a person be more effective, be more caring, be healthier, and believe me when I tell you that it will help you in your work as a decision maker for your organization.

Read stories, listen to stories, consider how we use this oldest form of communication, captured thousands and thousands of years ago on cave walls and stone etchings. The why comes long after understanding the "what".

I am balancing my reading this week between Mary's Writing to Change the World and Karen Armstrong's A Brief History of Myth. Are these primers in business management? Do they say "read this to learn what type of leader you are" or "thirty-second elevator speeches"? No.

But believe me, we have to first go back to learning to really think, contemplate, before we can benefit from 30 second speeches. Because hopefully someone is going to ask you a lot more about your organization after that 30 seconds. And you want to interest them, you want them to become really interested. And you need to be interesting yourself.

If you only get 12 hours to save the world

Okay, so this is going to be about the down and dirty, clear and candid story of the state of leadership - in this case volunteer boards and paid staff.

My theme --- if you only get 12 hours a year from a board member, what the heck are you doing with those twelve hours?! Is this commitment doled out by a) 3 hour slots in quarterly board meetings? b) 1+ hours 12 months a year? c) 1.5 hours every other month? d) 1+ hours 10 months of the year? Yeah, some of these don't actually come out to exactly 12 hours, but it's close enough.

I mention this, because when I meet with a board to talk about how to really build strategies and purpose that will "save the world", I have to ask them how many hours a year they are willing to commit to do this, eliminate homelessness, feed the hungry, stop drug abuse, save the animals, etc?

If you can count on 12 hours a year --- how would you spend your board meetings?

Again, if you only have 12 hours from anyone board member, what would you choose to have them do during those hours.

And if consider this, as we will over the next few weeks, then you may be able to build a board, build an organization that actually moves the marker an inch or so on your mission to save whatever world you claim in your mission.