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Notable Books
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In each issue, we identify and briefly describe a small number of important books that are truly insightful about consequential matters and offer new ways of addressing complex topics pertinent to thinking strategically about the nonprofit world. Herewith our selections for this issue:
Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage and Clarity
by David A. Aaker
Free Press, 2004. 348+xviii pp., $28.00
Although not often recognized, some of the most wellknown, powerful and enduring "brands" in the world are in the nonprofit sector: American Red Cross, Lincoln Center, Habitat for Humanity, Harvard University, Junior League, Salvation Army, Médecins sans Frontières, YMCA, to name just a few. Each of these organizations has a set of intangible assets in addition to their actual activities, services and programs. Instantly recognizable, each of these "brands" elicits a host of feelings, images and ideas that strengthen their visibility, identity and positioning in an increasingly crowded, cacophonous and fickle marketplace.
The private sector--and the retail customer market, in particular--has long recognized the importance of branding. Major corporations spend millions to establish, build and maintain brand identity--for particular products, services and the companies themselves. Nonprofits primarily gain brand identity through clarity of mission, strong program focus, consistent service delivery and successful fund raising (and capital campaigns, in particular). But as nonprofit organizations are competing harder than ever for customers, clients, applicants, donors and funders, they have a new interest, if not urgency, in branding as a means to more deliberately shape and communicate a clear identity.
| Some of the most well-known, powerful and enduring "brands" are in the nonprofit sector. |
David A. Aaker, E.T. Grether Emeritus Professor of Marketing Strategy at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley, provides multiple insights, helpful perspectives and reassuring clarity to the whole issue of branding: what it is, how it works, what its value is and why it is important. His new book, Brand Portfolio Strategy , builds upon two earlier volumes, Building Strong Brands (Free Press, 1996) and Brand Leadership (coauthored with Erich Joachimsthaler, Free Press, 2000), and together they provide a seminal treatment of the subject, easily accessible to the lay reader and highly applicable to the nonprofit sector.
Aaker's work provides a wealth of useful insights and guidance in making more informed and thoughtful decisions--and thus significantly strengthening brand identity and organizational positioning. Aaker suggests that a brand is far more than design (a distinctive logo), identifier (a pertinent tag line) or positioning statement (a short mission statement). Rather, he urges organizations to think of brands along multiple dimensions: as a product or service (stressing, for instance, its quality and value); an organization (emphasizing, for example, its innovation and concern for the customer); a symbol (using, for instance, an image and references to its heritage); and a customer or key person (stressing, for example, their skills or determination).
Aaker recommends that organizations think both about their "brand image"-- the current perception of itself--as well as their desired "brand identity"-- the set of associations that it wants the customer to hold. By thinking of these perspectives separately, an organization can devise ways to span the gap, recognizing that, just as in engineering, it is harder to build a long bridge than a short one.
Nonprofit organizations often make two key mistakes in branding. Because their units often function semiautonomously, those units tend to develop their own identities that make it difficult for current or potential customers, clients or donors to understand how they relate to the larger organization. And even when there is a single brand identity, it is often applied inconsistently, resulting in a missed opportunity to build a consistent portrait of the organization.
It is the wise nonprofit that realizes that the decisions it makes every day about its services have consequences for the way it is positioned in the minds of external audiences. It is the even wiser nonprofit that makes those decisions informed by a clear vision of how it wishes to be positioned--both explicitly and implicitly--in today's noisy marketplace.
The
State of Nonprofit America
by Lester M. Salamon, editor
Brookings Institution Press, 2002. 563+xi pp., $28.95
The nonprofit sector is large, complex and "messy," having grown in recent decades from a largely unanalyzed and rather poorly understood group of highly disparate institutions and organizations into a far more recognizable--and recognized--important segment of the U.S. economy. Comprising 12% of America's Gross National Product, the total nonprofit workforce of paid and voluntary workers is some 17.5 million, 50% more than construction and finance, insurance and real estate sectors combined and close to that of the entire U.S. manufacturing sector.
| Nonprofit organizations have survived or thrived over the past decade... because they moved, often decisively, toward the market. |
There has not previously been a comprehensive, but accessible, overview and assessment of the state of America's nonprofit sector that is informative to volunteer board members, executives and staff, policy makers and others. Happily, The State of Nonprofit America expertly fills that gap.
Edited by Lester Salamon, Director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies and former Deputy Associate Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, The State of Nonprofit America crisply analyzes the present state of the nonprofit sector; reviews major characteristics, trends, opportunities and risks within various components of the sector and the sector overall; and places the sector in the larger context of the post-September 11th world.
The book covers cross-cutting themes, including commercialization and for-profit competition; devolution and the changing shape of government-nonprofit relations; accountability; demographic and technological issues; and the contributions of the nonprofit sector. In addition, there are insightful essays on eleven individual sub-sectors, from health and education to community development and international assistance to foundations and corporate philanthropy to individual giving and volunteering.
With rich attention to detail and sources, Salamon argues that nonprofit organizations have survived and thrived over the past decade and are far more robust and adaptive than is sometimes thought by general observers because they moved, often decisively, toward the market. In particular, he notes that nonprofits as a sector have taken active advantage of growing demand for services, expanded fee income, launched commercial ventures, forged partnerships with businesses, adopted business-style management techniques, mastered new consumer-side forms of government funding, reshaped organizational structures and adopted sophisticated market and money-management techniques.
This has brought a set of unfamiliar challenges to the sector, including a growing identity crisis, increased demands on nonprofit executives and Board members, new threats to nonprofit missions, disadvantaging of smaller organizations and a potential loss of public trust. To deal with these risks, Salamon urges a rethinking and affirmation of the benefit of the sector, better capitalization, improving buy-in by third-party payers and encouraging private giving for high-priority community benefits.
All of these have important implications at the level of policy. Yet the analysis also suggests a new set of questions for nonprofit leaders at the level of practice: how to ensure that organizational structure and capacity that was built for an earlier age meets the ecology of the new landscape; how to structure partnerships in ways that harmonize mission and markets; and how to develop pricing strategies that are market-sensitive but also mission-driven.
Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College
Greater Expectations National Panel, Judith Ramaley, Chair
Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002. 60+xiv pp., $15.00
The U.S. has largely completed a transformation from an industrial to a knowledge-based society and is fast approaching universal participation in higher education in the U.S. But while public policy has largely focused on getting students into college, the performance of many students is increasingly faltering, with the result that college is a revolving door for many students and unrewarding for many more. This report analyzes the changing expectations for college-level learning at the beginning of this new century and calls for a dramatic reorganization of undergraduate education to ensure that all college aspirants receive not only access to college but also, once there, an education of lasting value.
| While public policy has largely focused on getting students into college, the performance of many students is faltering. |
Based on the work of a distinguished national panel of education, private sector, public policy and community leaders, the report recommends an end to the traditional distinctions between liberal and practical education and argues for a commitment, from school through college, to make liberal education--across all fields--rigorous, inclusive and pragmatic.
Most intriguingly, the report suggests a tripartite argument for this new kind of education--that students need to be "empowered through the mastery of intellectual and practical skills; informed by knowledge about the natural and social worlds and about forms of inquiry basic to these studies; and responsible for their personal actions and for civic values."
The report makes suggestions about the knowledge and capacities all students should acquire, calling for higher education to help all students become intentional learners who can "adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources and continue learning throughout their lives." It recommends far closer working relationships between higher and secondary education and describes a learning-center New Academy that embodies a culture centered on learning. It also includes concrete examples of what it considers to be good practice drawn from a wide variety of different institutions and contexts.
The report perceptively analyzes several challenges confronting higher education and suggests a new strategic direction for a whole sector to move beyond them, while grounding its recommendations with a thoughtful recognition of the range and diversity of American colleges and universities.
Paris 1919 : Six Months that Changed the World
by Margaret MacMillan. Foreword by Richard Holbrooke
Random House, 2002. 570 pp., $35.00
Organizations are better off when they plan and act strategically and ensure that their day-to-day actions build toward larger objectives which are clearly delineated and widely understood. But although ideas are at the heart of strategy, we ignore at our peril the personal predilections of forceful leaders who are driven to settle scores, bring about radical change or transform the world without sufficient understanding of the possible implications or likely consequences of their actions.
That lesson clearly emerges from Paris 1919 , winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, among other honors. The book brilliantly illuminates the fateful six months after World War I when the maps of Europe and much of the rest of the world were redrawn--with consequences that endure today. Margaret MacMillan, Provost of Trinity College and Professor of History at the University of Toronto, provides a compelling portrait of Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and a cast of hundreds more who sought to end "the war to end all wars."
| Although ideas are at the heart of strategy, we ignore at our peril the personal predilections of forceful leaders. |
Rich in detail, scrupulously researched and unfailingly lively, this book compellingly portrays the complex political and contradictory human idiosyncrasies of the leaders who wrestled with the major issues that emerged as the war ended. It shows how their personalities determined the decisions reached at the Peace Conference and immediately thereafter, shaped the balance of the twentieth century and led to many of the problems that are today's headlines--including Bosnia, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Africa, international governance, immigration and human rights, among others.
The great-granddaughter of Lloyd George, MacMillan convincingly argues that the peacemakers have been unfairly tainted as failing to prevent another war. This widely accepted view both distorts the nature of the decisions made in Paris and minimizes the impact of actions taken in subsequent years. The Peace Conference was about much more than producing the treaty that Germany signed.
But the Peace Conference tried to do too much too quickly and early on made decisions that significantly compromised its ability to resolve thoughtfully or carefully the larger matters on its agenda. From the outset, there was confusion over the organization, purpose and procedures of the Conference. The reality in Paris was starkly different from that on the ground away from the peace table: communications were fitful; misconceptions rampant; coordination episodic; and fatigue increasingly dominant.
But most of all it was the powerful men, with their likes and dislikes, their national interests and constraints and their hopes and fears, who are critical in understanding the Peace Conference and its impact on the world over the subsequent eight and a half decades. Britain's Lloyd George was wily, amusing and pragmatic; France's Clemenceau was formidable, implacable and controlling, insisting that the Conference be held in Paris, a decision that greatly complicated matters.
And above all, it was President Wilson who played the major role. Idealistic, naïve and noble, he was also remote, rigid and conflicted. He stirred great hopes with his Fourteen Points and the concept of "self-determination", a phrase that even Wilson at times seemed unclear as to what he actually meant. He was often ill-informed and badly prepared for negotiations. He badly compromised his dreams in Paris and then made the opposite mistake upon his return home when he refused to make relatively minor concessions.
Beyond being a fascinating and sobering history, Paris 1919 is important to nonprofit leaders for a number of reasons. It illuminates how an extraordinary turning point in history came to shape forcefully today's world and the policy framework--foreign, social and policy--within which nonprofit organizations operate. It illustrates how poorly conceived strategic aspirations and decisions, made with insufficient clarity or precision, can have far reaching consequences. And it vividly tells the story of how damaging overarching ambition, insufficiently informed and grounded, can be in both the short- and longer-term.
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