Last week I asked if your nonprofit was ready to stop watching the clock in a post discussing Best Buy's Results-Oriented Work Environment (ROWE). As a quick recap, Best Buy is now allowing a significant portion of its employees to work from home or other locations and to work whatever hours they need in order to achieve clearly-defined work objectives. Face time is no longer considered a requirement of most... Read more →

My husband, like many Americans, is unhappy with his job. It is a job that combines impossibly high expectations with little personal control. There is a strong emphasis on "face-time" and productivity is measured by your slavish adherence to poorly thought-out metrics that emphasize process over outcomes. So it was interesting to find, as often happens to me when a problem is on my mind, this post from Ryan Healey... Read more →

When I first started blogging, I was so full of ideas and things I wanted to say that my biggest problem was shutting myself up. Now as my blog approaches it's first birthday, I'm finding that I'm struggling with maintaining a consistent blogging schedule. Work intervenes, yes, but there are other issues at work as well, as Nate Whitehill points out in this post on blogging consistently. According to Nick,... Read more →

It's interesting the difference a day makes. Yesterday I expressed my frustration over my inability to change people who are meant to be change agents. Writing it down got most of the negative energy I was feeling out of my system. It also left me some space to think a little more about the problem. And another reason to be grateful for blogging--writing about it brought me some good advice... Read more →

Part of learning and growing, I think, is getting comfortable with being a beginner. Realistically, as quickly as things change anymore, we're always a beginner at something. As soon as we think we've mastered one thing, there will be five more skills we need to learn just to keep up. If we aren't able to accept this, we'll be in big trouble. I've been thinking about this a lot today.... Read more →

Robin Good has another great article today on Educating the Net Generation. Ironic, given my previous post on the digital divide. I completely agree that many in this new generation of kids are a different breed, with different approaches to learning and that schools need to learn to adapt their teaching protocols accordingly. But I also think that characterizing all learners as being this net savvy obscures the very real... Read more →

A common complaint I hear from supervisors is that they haven't been "taught" to manage. The assumption, here, is that if the organization hasn't sent you to a training, how could you possibly be expected to know how to be a good manager? My personal feeling? That's a cop-out, especially in the age of so many free online tools and resources. So here are a few you can use to... Read more →

As usual, Seth Godin hits the customer service nail on the head: If you're going to be in the service business, you need to accept that or you're going to hate it and be lousy at it, both at the same time. I hate to say it, but I've been in many a nonprofit/government agency where I've been greeted with just this kind of sign. It's meant to be helpful... Read more →

A few weeks ago, Michelle Murrain asked a great question--How do we make change if we keep doing things the same way? (I would argue that you can't, but that's not the point of this post.) Now David Wilcox and some other collaborators are looking at how they can use a different process for a familiar nonprofit activity--responding to a Request for Proposal/Invitation to Tender (depending on your location). Writes... Read more →

Via Doing Well by Doing Good comes a great video in which Seventh Generation CEO Jeffrey Hollender asks a question that all nonprofits should be asking themselves: "How can we expect an organization to reach its full potential if we aren't ensuring that our staff are reaching their full potential?" That's a really profound question, I think, especially for organizations that are built upon the knowledge and skills of their... Read more →