Ed Bogle is a Strategic Planning Consultant that serves as a mentor, coach and consultant to entrepreneurs and non-profit executives. In the case of non-profits, Ed specializes in developing and implementing innovative solutions in defining their strategic value to those they serve and building a "brand" that moves beyond scarcity to a level of abundance. His firm ideationEDGE works with their clients to understand their "value" creation and "revenue" production.
He has worked with and served as a coach and mentor to several non-profits and two of Inc Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year regional winners. He developed a deep passion for non-profits through a frustration from serving on boards and seeing great visionary work die due to funding shortages and donor fatigue. Understanding revenues and creating abundance comes from carefully crafted strategies driven from a long-term vision and a constancy of purpose.
Some questions to ponder:
What is strategy and why is it important to the charity I lead?
Does a written strategic plan limit my creativity?Â
Why and how should me board be involved in the planning?
How does anyone predict the future with any success?
Here's the Transcript
Nonprofit Chat – Ed Bogle – 7/18/17
Hugh Ballou: Welcome. It’s another session of the Nonprofit Chat live. We’re going to talk about some important stuff tonight. Russell Dennis has been my co-host on this series. Russell, how are you doing tonight?
Russell Dennis: It’s another fine night here in the mountain west. Beautiful skies and life is good.
Hugh: You are always good. We are in the old mountains. I am in southwest Virginia, and it’s a lovely evening. We have a mutual friend on here tonight. Besides that, we know he is a very skilled professional. We know he works with business leaders on all levels. He has a special niche of helping entrepreneurs get clarity on what their vision is, on what their market is, and how we get there. We call that strategy. He has done some amazing projects with some specific nonprofits, and there have been some that have really done well. Ed understands the nonprofit space. He understands what the challenges are, and how to come around and address those challenges. Ed, welcome to the Nonprofit Chat tonight.
Ed: Thanks, Hugh. I am privileged to be here. I have a great passion for the nonprofit world. We need them to do their jobs and live their vision and mission so we can make it a better world. I will do what I can to help.
Hugh: Somebody once taught me that the work of nonprofits is more important now than ever before in history, and there are fewer resources. We have to do really well at describing the impact we are going to have in people’s lives. I think it was a guy named Ed Bogle who told that to me.
Ed: I had a good idea about some of that stuff now, didn’t I? Well, you know, so many nonprofits, and even our churches, come from a position of scarcity so often. That clarity of vision and that clarity of the persona, the branding, you talked a couple sessions ago about the branding world, it is what gets people excited to your brand. It has a business flavor to it. When we do that, we find some pretty magnanimous results. We really like to carry into the nonprofit a lot of the business sector stuff and hopefully do it better.
Hugh: Our friend David Corbin talked about brand slaughter. We illuminated a few things in that session, as you might expect. Everybody has a uniqueness to share about this. As I understand strategy, it is the framework that is going to help us engage our stakeholders. Otherwise, people are hunting for what to do. It’s the clarity of the sequence. It’s the railroad tracks to get you from where you are to where you want to be. Before we get into the strategy world, let’s talk about the Bogle world. It’s not the wine Bogle world; it’s the Ed Bogle world.
Ed: I drink a lot of that. Nah, I’m kidding.
Hugh: But your people bring it over and you have a whole closetful.
Ed: At one time, we had 45 bottles of Bogle wine in our house.
Hugh: I know what to ask for next time I’m there. Let’s talk about Ed Bogle. Who is Ed Bogle, and what is your background in strategy, and why is that important to you? We’ll talk about you first, and then we’ll talk about it for others.
Ed: Basically, my undergraduate was in marketing, and my graduate degree was in strategy. But I was trained as an investment banker and commercial lender until that bank brought in a new president and said, “We want you to be the marketing and strategy guy because you have the educational background for it. You just finished our year-long management and development program, so you can do that.” I took that on, and the long and short of that story is that we grew the bank from $250 million to $1.6 billion in less than four years without an acquisition. It was all organic growth because he gave me carte blanche to focus on what was changing in the marketplace and how we related to our customers.
That early on lesson was all about getting not only outside of the box, but it was innovating. We did some innovating stuff. Some of you may have heard of a little piece of equipment called an ATM. We put the first remote automated teller system in the country out. We put 12 units out all at once and promoted the living daylights out of it. That was 1975. The importance of that lesson is to look for the innovation, to look for the change. We so far exceeded our own expectations of what that would do.
After I left the banking industry, I went to work for a little firm called Ernst and Young, then one of the big eight. I was part of a team of seven that built their strategy process over about a year long. Then I was leading a team of three to adopt that to the entrepreneurial services world. It was in my days at Ernst and Young that I had my first brushes with the nonprofit world. I saw a lot of people running around with a lot of tasks and people holding out their hats begging for the same donors every year. That is where I learned a term called donor fatigue, which all of us are familiar with. We wear them out. While I was at Ernst and Young, we created a process called focus strategic framework. Our plans end up on one page, and we have used it in the nonprofit sector as well as the church sector. It’s all about change.
One of the great lessons of strategy that I learned through that course of effort is one of the only constants is change. If you agree that the world is going to change, and you agree it is pretty unpredictable. Back when I used to speak and lecture, I asked, “How many people believe the conditions under which your business exist today will be the same three years from now?” I have never had anybody raise their hands. I would suspect that would be true in the nonprofit world. The way you conduct your business won’t be the same three years from now. You get that clarity of vision, that clarity of purpose, that engagement culture that really goes with this.
People ride for the brand. That is the critical part of the integration of the framework process. We have a new vision, mission, brand strategy. We have set objectives and all of that, and we know that is going to change, so we like to get people on a horizon of 5-7 years out, then concentrate what we are going to do the next 12-18 months. Then build such a culture internally that people are engaged in change. They have their antennae out. It’s not solely the responsibility of the leadership of any organization; it’s a responsibility of everybody. I don’t know if the brand guys talk to this, but if I can get anybody in my organization riding for the brand—they defend the brand, understand the brand, have clarity on vision, mission, purpose of the organization—their role in fulfilling the brand, and I am not talking about their job description. If I get that, then I will have the ability to change and integrate and build a culture that will be successful.
Then if I study the marketplace, it starts and stops with a customer or somebody that you are engaging in your organization. It starts with your constituents, your stakeholders. How are we creating value for them, and how do we create that value over time?
If I pick on the churches for just a second, why is it that all the big churches out there now seem to be these rock ’n’ roll churches? The non-traditional churches are having trouble getting people in their pews, yet the churches like- There is one here that has 26 locations around the country called Life Church. They have four locations in Tulsa. That place is packed. They have six services on Sunday, and all six of them are packed. Where is that coming from? It’s all about understanding your target market and how you serve them.
I’ll quit there; otherwise, it will start to feel like I am teaching class.
Hugh: That is part of what it is. Russ, does that pique some interest for you?
Russell: It all makes perfect sense. These are some of the things that I have been trying to convey to people in creating a framework when I work with nonprofits. It’s getting to that mission and understanding who you are at your core. Knowing people at your very core is important. Those churches with the music, what they are going to find is they have a younger audience. You’re going out there and really talking to markets. It almost seems like dirty language to some in the nonprofit world, but what we have are customers; we just have different segments. Donors are one segment. The people who get your services are the other. If you don’t understand what they need, the people that you put programs together to serve, nobody will access your services. I have had talks with people who say, “I don’t get it. Nobody is coming.” We went through and talked about what some of those needs for those clients were. There is definitely a need, but they decided they are going to operate out of a location that was not accessible to the people they wanted to serve.
Hugh: The church world is not very different than some of the other worlds. I was on a chamber webinar today with one of the chambers in Florida. Engagement, and especially engagement with millennials, but they said the other organizations in the neighborhood, the rotaries and other service clubs, have had sidebar with the chamber saying that they are having trouble growing their membership. They are having trouble engaging people. It was a whole session about board empowerment today. I suggested with a lack of strategy, people don’t know where to be engaged or what to do. They aren’t really clear what the endgame is. Furthermore, if they weren’t part of the initial planning process, or at last a revision or upgrading, and doing tactics for the long-term objectives, they really aren’t engaged at all. There is a trend for boards not to be effective.
Let’s go back to the centrality of strategy. As you know, I approach the world with the left and right brain. As a musician, we have a very specific framework. In music, it’s the sheet music itself, the musical score. All the players have their parts. The analogy I make is that it’s their strategy, and everybody on the team has their own piece of the action plan. They know when to play, how loud to play, how fast to play, and we direct the process rather than try to do it all. There is the heavy lifting on the front to put that together. Respond to some of that long dialogue about strategy. I am an Ed Bogle strategy fan. You strategize your life as well as everyone else.
Ed: My wife also told me that that didn’t work very well in strategizing your life and the raising of your children. With the latter, I would totally agree. It’s impossible to strategize raising children, so give it up if you are trying it. I tried it, and it didn’t work.
In response to what you were talking about, Hugh, the whole thing is you want everybody in your organization to be bought into the mission and vision of what you are doing. Therefore, they need to be a part of it. That doesn’t mean they need to sit through long planning meetings, but they need to be a part of the development of that strategy. In particular, one of the things we do oftentimes is we have people in the organization that have different roles or employees, in the case of some of them, that they write their description of their role. Not their job description, not their daily task, but what is their role in completing or living to that vision and mission of that organization? It’s stunning what we come up with. If we attach them to this one-page framework, or any framework you use, what happens is they now have ownership.
Russell mentioned common sense earlier, and the old adage is that it’s not so common. What in particular that gives organizations sustainability, stickability, is the engagement of cultures. I want people internally riding for the brand. That means they are bought into that constant collaboration and innovation. They don’t have silos of jobs. They are wrapped around what is our value, our brand promise is to our constituents. What is our brand position? How do they attach to that? What is their role in doing that? We use a few tools to do that.
Hugh, I know you have a few things you do with organizations to bring them to that level. Gosh, if they’ve got this framework down and they understand it. If you give them vision, if you have a one-page framework that links from mission to vision, values, purposes, grand strategy all the way out to long-term objectives, competencies, capabilities, long-term objectives, short-term objectives, strategies, and action plan, it’s a big one page.
At the end of the day, I have had clients blow up wall-size versions of this framework, and we would do training sessions where they would work with their division, their people, for themselves individually as to how I am attached to that framework, that strategy. Then they would all autograph it. There is one client I started working with nearly 30 years ago that still does that stuff. They are running out of places for people to sign. It’s amazing the difference it makes when you bring that level of consciousness up for their connection to the organization, vision and mission, as opposed to a set of tasks, a job task. It’s critically important.
I don’t care if you’re a charity, church, or for-profit. In today’s world, if the only constant is change, how do you change? You have to have the people going with you. In fact, if you really look deeply at innovation in organizations, it usually comes from the lowest level, who are the people closest to our constituents or customers. Am I making any sense?
Hugh: You are. Addressing the needs of the world. When you teach, usually when I am with you, you are teaching me. You don’t know it, but I am listening.
The describing the impact, especially for charities. If we are going to attract people who want to be engaged with us, as you know, in SynerVision, we are encouraging people to use other words than “volunteer.” We want servant leaders, we want community leaders, and in churches, we want members of ministry. There is another term that indicates they are active and are doing something meaningful. Volunteer means it’s laidback and I will do what I have to do until I go home. We are about changing paradigms, and we get stuck in the activity mode rather than the results mode. Part of what I value about your teaching is we define the end result, we look at what we are going toward, so then we get people looking in the same direction.
I heard you say a couple things here, and then I want to come back and ask you about the significance. One is about the one page. One was I’ve met your children and I think you did a fine job. They are fine human beings.
Ed: My wife did.
Hugh: That’s usually the case.
Ed: Credit where credit is due, please.
Hugh: We overcame our shortages. What is the significance of being able to have it on one page?
Ed: There are a couple of points about that. One is it’s easy to digest and look at it. There are a lot of supporting documents sometimes. You can go to an electronic file on Mission, and there will be tons of documents and videos for people who want to understand and learn about those parts of it. We call it an agenda for leadership because it links everything together. The leaders of the organization now have the ability to go out and say, “Hey, here is our framework.” When most of our clients do quarterly reviews, including the nonprofits, they go in and do what we call the rearview mirror in the windshield. Rearview mirror is what has happened to us and why. Then you have the windshield, which is bigger. That is the proportionate amount of time you spend on that. The rearview mirror, what happened to you, you can’t do anything about it, but you can take a little bit of the lessons learned. Some organizations now aren’t even doing any rearview mirror. The Twitter CEO said a few years ago, “We don’t even look in the rearview mirror anymore. It’s all forward.” It’s a little bit of creating processes internally. What you do is you look in the rearview mirror, you look out your windshield, and you bring it back into that framework and see if you need to change strategies. Is it something we need to do now? Do we need to reallocate resources? That one-page framework becomes a document from which you can make decision and assess changes in your organizations and make things happen.
Hugh: There is some synergy in what you said and what David Corbin said. Everybody brings a little bit of extra perspective to the topics that people think they know a lot about but we really don’t.
I like that. Russell, do you have a comment or question brewing? He needs a hard question.
Russell: You can’t stump a man with as much experience as he has. He has been at a few rodeos. A lot of what he is talking about are things I try to incorporate. Having everybody participate in it is important. That seems to be a little bit of a problem spot from what I am seeing. You get a few people. You might even have a power driver or some really strong personality in the group, and they just take over. People don’t have that buy-in if you don’t bring everybody together to formulate. I see that again and again.
Ed: That doesn’t mean you have to drive people through lots of meetings. Especially in the corporate world, we have a lot of meetings. A client of mine refers to a staff meeting as a staff infection, which is what they affectionately call it. We could get into too many meetings. There are all sorts of tools and techniques to use to increase participation. It’s not top-down. It’s top-down, bottom’s up, continuous flow of thought and conversation about strategy. Strategy is not the annual perfunctory enema that we go through to come up with a budget, which is what most corporations do. It is a process that should be integrated in and be a part of your management systems. It is not an outlier that occurs once a year. Create a plan and a budget. Hugh loves this phrase, but most of those plans end up as credenzaware. They go through this process. Any of you who worked in corporate America know what I’m talking about. They go through this annual ballyhoo of our assumptions and our plan. They hit the first of the financial projections, and expenses are too high, incomes and revenues too low, so they go back and redo it and redo it and redo it. Finally in December, the managers say, “What the heck is the number you want me to get?” Each department comes up with a way to hit their numbers. Now what do they have? We have a set of numbers not driven by a strategy.
That spills over into the nonprofit world, too. A lot of the nonprofit world makes a lot of assumptions about what they cannot do. I don’t know about you guys personally, but when I work with the nonprofit world, there is a lot of, “Well, we can’t do that.” I worked with the Housing Authority of the city of Tulsa. One of the board members called the director an excuse bag. We’re not funded. We can’t be funded. We don’t have enough funding. We can’t raise that kind of money. They’d get into these circles of spiral downs. I have done it and seen it done elsewhere to where we can bring a level of excitement.
Some of these nonprofits, it might take two decades to get to a certain point, but think about in the context of a corporation like Apple. It took them years to get to where they are. Did they have a road map to end up at the iPhone and iPad and all the services they provide now? No. They evolved to that.
Any leader of any organization is the leader of change. It’s not my job to come up with a five-year plan that we are going to stick to, live through, and file through. Go over the top with our energy levels and our dedication to that? No. It’s the doctrine that may drive you. The purposes, the value systems are really important. Values can be a competency incidentally as a side note. What’s important to me is the people are bought into that, including your constituents. Where a lot of organizations make the mistake is in raising money or attracting people to volunteer, they don’t get them excited about it.
Most of those organizations are about as exciting as- They have been doing the same thing for 24 years. I worked with one organization that is probably in its 30th year of the same annual fundraiser. It raises about the same annual amount of money. They just switch faces once a while because donors pass away or get fatigued. Where is the excitement? They have to get connected with your purpose, your why. A lot of folks forget about that. We have to go out and be very creative about how we craft and raise those funds and the funding.
Hugh: To your point, there are two videos that are helpful. One is “Begin with Why” the Simon Sinek Ted Talk. “The Way We Think of Charity is Dead Wrong” by Dan Pallotta. He talks about how we have this perception that we can’t do it, that we can’t spend money on salaries or marketing. There is this fictitious percentage of overhead. Is your overhead too high? If you have to spend money on marketing and on bodies so you can serve the constituency and actually get traction to the vision you have articulated, I think busting those old perceptions- That is what I am all about: helping people shift their paradigm.
I want to talk about the military part of tactics and transformational leadership because there is a synergy that occurred to me we have never talked about. We will expose it out here in public. But when you talk about strategy, I have actually had nonprofit leaders say, “No, no. I don’t want to write anything down. It will limit my creativity,” to which I come back and say, “This is a solution map.” You’ve seen the SynerVision solution map, and you say that it’s strategy, Hugh. Where do you want to be? How are you going to get there?
I want you to respond this. My answer is that the strategy, the system, is the container for creativity. You can now be creative because you know how to be creative. You know where you’re going, and you get the energy. Part of this is looking at your phases as you grow, so you are always keeping fresh. Talk about how that limits creativity and how you keep it fresh, your process of migrating it over time.
Ed: The limitations on creativity is because we, corporations especially, everybody looks to the management for the answers, right? Creativity comes from the top, and that is totally 100% false. That is not generally where it’s going to come from. The creativity or the future of any organization comes from within the people themselves and an examination on a periodic basis of that external environment is changing, both for opportunity and threat. Did Corbin talk about SWOT analysis?
Hugh: He did not.
Ed: He and I both abhor them, not because it’s a bad tool, but the way we implement it. Everyone has the tendency to want to talk about what? Their strengths and their opportunities. They sweep the rest of the stuff, the weaknesses and the threats, under the carpet. If you have two of them, you have a SO-SO strategy because you are only focused on opportunities and strengths. You build an organization in response to people and constituents and how they are changing over time.
One of my great frustrations when I run planning sessions is that I know I have young people in the room, and I know they are creative as hell and they have great ideas and thoughts. They don’t want to embarrass themselves and bring that out. The leadership doesn’t necessarily bring that out. In fact, in my early career, when I facilitated some of those meetings, it became a dialogue between myself and the CEO of the company. Boy was that meaningful. Not. We were limiting the creativity. We shift around, and we invite that creativity in. In fact, I encourage my CEOs of both nonprofit and for-profit organizations not to lay out scenarios. Let’s come up with the scenarios. Let’s put the antennae up.
To me, one of the signs of great success in an organization is when I get compulsive innovation and collaboration. People talk around the water cooler, so to speak, although there aren’t many of those anymore, about what’s going on, what the future is, what the organization is. We do periodic methodologies where we check in with people and find out what is changing about our constituents. For example, if you want to get millennials involved with your organization today, they won’t touch you with a ten-foot pole unless you can identify your why, your mission, your purpose, and how they have a role in fulfilling that. It’s a whole different ball game.
The limiting behaviors come because we have a tendency as leaders to bring people down the path we believe are important. That becomes trickier in the church world because they have doctrine. I also find doctrine personally as an excuse not to address what our members need.
Hugh: Oh yeah.
Ed: That’s a fact based upon my experience. What was the second half you wanted me to talk about?
Hugh: Actually to that point, that is one of the things limiting the church. The Methodist church is losing 1,200 members a week. That is not unique among mainline dominations. We have not made it relevant. We don’t have a strategy. The Methodist church globally says that their mission is to make disciples. They need a strategist to help them develop a mission. What do you do after you develop disciples? We could talk about that all the time. Having someone who understands how strategy drives results. It’s not inside. It’s somebody external.
The other part is your multi-phase growth plan and migrating it over time.
Ed: What we do is bring in an organization into a three- or four-phase growth plan. That will cover a 5-7-year horizon. We don’t have much detail, nor are we doing resourcing on phase three or four. We are resourcing that next phase because we are then using our quarterly meetings and our interchanges about what is changing and the opportunity, the rearview mirror, and the windshield to determine how we are going to change it. We continually update the phase growth plan. Even in the financial arena, we do a rolling horizon set of financials. Every quarter, we update that plan literally. It takes less than half a day to do it. But what a great investment. You are always revising that plan. Once you start down that path or mode, and you have people engaged in doing that, it changes the whole dynamics of the organization and its growth. I have seen it. I have done it in nonprofits.
My favorite thing, the Life Senior Services here in Tulsa where I reside, that is such a dynamic organization. My latest one down in Houston, Texas called Reasoning Minds is a nonprofit all about math education. The bottom line is they are sitting right now on $25 million a year of revenues and income streams because of how they have structured. We got them out of scarcity mode and into a phase growth plan. They know where they want to be five years from now, and they had to bite the bullet and do some things differently, coming out of our strategy, getting rid of some things that were skeletons that hung in a closet forever, like committees. They were wasting time because nothing was attached to a framework; it was just commotion to commotion.
Don’t we all hate committees? When I was in the corporate world, they had committee meetings. You know how I treat committee meetings? I say, “Okay, you can form a committee as long as you write the epitaph of a committee.” What day are they going to die, and what is going to be the epitaph that says what is going to be accomplished?
Hugh: What is your definition of a committee? It’s a place where good ideas…
Ed: …Die. No, they have a tendency to become- We have this committee and that committee, but they are not attached to a strategy. They become functional because they are supposed to do things. I’m not saying you kill committees. I am just saying to change the dynamics of what they are attached to. What is their contribution in the overall strategic plan? In the objectives? How do they contribute to that? Get the committee to identify that, and then you migrate it over time.
Hugh: I don’t know about this killing thing. I have spoken to a few people about team execution, and they got really excited because they thought they were going to get to shoot people.
Ed: They though execution was a firing squad, huh?
Hugh: I shouldn’t joke like that. This is a lot of really good tactical stuff. Let’s look at the grand strategy as a model of you have an objective, and then you define the tactics for that objective. Transformational leadership was birthed out of the military model, where you have to have a high-performing team that you cannot micro-manage when you are in combat. I have reframed that to be an orchestra model, and in a concert, you can’t be telling people what to do. You have to have rehearsed. It’s the integration of what’s written into performance. We have to make it come alive. The grand strategy comes out of this world.
Speak a little bit about objectives. We see a lot of people doing this, that, and the other. We are talking to social entrepreneurs who might be running a church, charity, or business. Nonprofit executives are entrepreneurs because we are not doing the corporate thing. People ask me if all entrepreneurs suffer from insanity. I say, “Heck no, we enjoy it.”
Ed: Well said.
Hugh: This military model of laying down this track, speak a little bit about the genesis of strategy and how that relates. Work in the leadership piece if you will.
Ed: The whole thing, just to expound on what you are saying there. Strategy has its birth. When I became a student of strategy, there was a gentleman who wrote a book called Ongoing Strategist by Michael David. The book was published in the early ‘80s. He was the mentor who Arthur Young hired to supervise us seven young renegades on how to put this process together to sell it to our clients. He made us read Napoleon’s Maxim on War, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, whose basic premise was nobody understood the mission was; therefore, how could you ever win? It was pretty well borne out in the Vietnam War sadly. Some of the Middle East Wars had that flavor to them. It’s hard for them to react in the field to what they are supposed to be doing. If you go deep into the military axioms, one word you never hear said is goals. Whenever you hear me use the word objective, they are interchangeable. Goals have the tendency to be softer, fluffier, not with a sharp edge. Military people are like they are going to take Mt. Sarabachi by next Tuesday. We want that kind of sharpness in our objectives in our organization so that the departments can break it down into pieces.
The other thing that you learn about military stuff when you dive deeper is mass scale and superiority of defense. Charities don’t have to work in these terms, but if you think about it, our nonprofits out there are competing for dollars, volunteers, and people. There is a thing about building a defensible position. The military world and its leadership, as you were talking about, if you get those troops out there, they are brought into the mission. They know we are going to win this war. The mission is to complete this war. They understand the mission. Their attachment to that becomes how they behave in the marketplaces, they execute your strategies and deploy your resources. It all ties back to that mission and that set of objectives. With real clarity of objectives. We let our business units and our subdivisions of our organization come back and say, “No, no, no, your long-term objectives are wrong. We need to change those.” Oftentimes they are not shooting high enough.
A lot of the military stuff involves leadership, but it involves it to the point where people are doing what I talked about earlier, which was almost compulsive innovation and collaboration can make things occur. Work across departmental lines. It’s not selfish. That’s a lot of the problem with corporations. There are too many people competing with each other to rise to the top. Inside of those charity organizations, I think it is more critical maybe that we have that clarity of vision and mission and the attachment to purpose. The leadership has got to help embellish that and get people to buy into that, not just tell them what it is, but to buy into it. Why should they buy into it? How does it impact their daily work life when they are working with the organization?
I don’t know if I have successfully done the consultant bit and avoided answering your question, or if I was going where you thought I was going to go with that.
Hugh: Russell, why don’t you weigh in on that?
Russell: I think you answered quite a bit there, why it’s important for nonprofit leaders to buy into these types of things. I think that thinking is a lot softer in these nonprofit circles. With today’s climate, we have to be firmer in our thinking because you are in business, you are providing value, and people need to see that value. We are in a place where there is a lot of noise out there, and people have a lot to choose from. If you don’t give people good, firm calls to action, they will look to somebody else to solve the problem. With some of the problems we are facing, you have to be tenacious to get the resources and make a real difference in people’s lives. The climate has changed in terms of what is out here, what is available. The government is looking to do less and less. They don’t necessarily do everything.
Ed: Sometimes it appears that way. Sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know. If you figure out what direction our government is currently heading in, please send me a memo. I need to understand. I’m confused.
Russell: I was just thinking about that remark that you made about the consultant not answering your question thing. You are going to have to get a lot better in the doubletalk to run .
Ed: I would never succeed as a politician. I have been told I am excessively blunt in declaring the truth. Guess you can’t do that as a politician.
The importance of our charities, too, one comment came into my mind. We have a lot of people who are downtrodden and in poverty. We have a lot of bigotry in this country, let’s face it. We have a lot of issues that are social issues. When the people get engaged and involved, that is when they get solved. Government does not have a great track record of solving social issues. Nor did our forefathers ever frame it to do that. We need our charities to step up and succeed.
The good part about it is there is an awful lot of money and wealth out there that want to get involved into charities. Businesses, for-profit corporations, will not survive another decade without a purpose-driven agenda. If they don’t stand for something for the greater good, their bottom line, their stock-holders, will not exist. The millennials don’t buy into that.
My youngest son got invited to General Motors up in Michigan. I had happy feet because we had just dropped $140,000 on his education. I thought that he would get this great job. He came back and said, “I can’t work there. I don’t like the way they do what I’m asked to do. I don’t like anything about their values or systems. It’s all about the profits. Their processes are bad. I will fail if I try to do that.” I did the standard dad bit and said, “Just get it on your resume for a little while.”
Coming back full circle to that, the public/private partnership is only going to get bigger. You see more and more organizations working with nonprofits and dedicating some resources. We have a lot of billionaires out there who are looking for something. I got involved in a deal on a big project, and if you took the five wealthiest families in the country, three of the five were involved in this project. They want to get their money back out in circulation for meaningful things. There is an opportunity to do that, but they just don’t want to hand their money to another charity that will fizzle and have a low-end impact. They want the exciting stuff. If you are a purpose-driven business—I am not talking about building a foundation and handing out money, I am talking about truly getting involved and adopting and working with these charities to really make things happen. That is where the leadership comes in.
A quick side-note to Hugh in the leadership world: When we so succeeded with the Life Senior Services group and built such a powerful, responsive, well-thought-out organization where people fly in from all over the country to see, their question is, “How the hell did you guys do that?” We have around 36 board members. People will think that is a bit unwieldy. People are looking at it from the aspect of the board supervising and overseeing. That board is there to work with smaller groups and truly get involved in the execution of the strategy. We have attracted some business leaders out of the community, and a few of them provide money and help us raise additional money. I like a self-sustaining revenue model if I can get to it.
The whole leadership thing is critically important, but you have to do it in a context of something people get excited about.
Hugh: That brings us to the third question I posted earlier. The third one to ponder is about the board being engaged in the planning process. To your point, Ed, the integration of strategy and performance, you see people that write a strategy and it becomes credenzaware. It never gets integrated into the culture. We see people doing leadership and teams in the absence of a strategy. That is why I have created this nonconsulting position of the transformational leadership strategist. You can’t separate leadership and strategy in my world.
Ed: I agree.
Hugh: The third point to ponder was about the board’s engagement. We have spoken about it in this conversation. We are on the down-end of this hour. I want to hit some of the highlights about integrating the board into the process. In my experience of 31 years, the planners and the doers are the same. Otherwise, they will never be engaged. Talk about that a little bit. We are going to talk about how we predict the future as we wrap this up. Talk about how we engage the board and that process.
Ed: The way we do that is because we use the focus framework process, which we developed in the hallowed halls of Ernst & Young years ago. I have tweaked it a lot since then and adapted it to the nonprofit world. We typically do is the board level talks of discussion, we set up with the boards that works really well, Hugh, and I think you do some of this also. One of the reasons we have 34 board members on Life Senior Services is we have mentoring and masterminds going on. I call it the M&Ms and the As. We build mentors. We use our board to mentor some of these people and help them build plans. We help them sit with the departmental people and build plans and facilitate. It makes a huge difference. The Masterminds is us masterminding the future. Everyone has inputs and portals to all of the things going on externally to our organization that might impact us in the future. We have masterminds going on, so people plug in and out of those. The leadership wants to monitor what is going on there.
You know me, Hugh. I am an alliance partnership freak. I think one of the ways you get things done. One reason that Life Senior Services is successful and the Housing Authority is successful is because we built alliances with the people we needed to to execute our strategies. The leadership has got to in the planning process meet- There are two pieces to it. There is the overall purpose of the organization. What are our longer-term visions and objectives? There needs to be some clear definition there as to how you see that so we can at least get a scope of what we are trying to accomplish. The other part of that is the lower pieces of the organization flow that information back up, they react to that direction, some of them have been involved in mentoring and masterminding processes and have now created some departmental and divisional plans. Now we have a total integration between the board and the lower levels. That is not possible in every organization, but it works well for most. Did I successfully avoid your question?
Hugh: There is not one right answer here.
Ed: It does depend on the personality of the organization. One quick comment because I don’t want to miss it in our last few minutes is that people who volunteer and get involved in boards flat-out need to be excited about what it is you’re doing. Too many of these organizations don’t look to their future in how it’s really exciting.
Back in the day when we were forming what was Tulsa Senior Services and now Life Senior Services formulated and moving forward, that organization was not exciting. It was mamby-pamby, oh they need a hotline, they need to find services, they need information, they need access to housing, caregivers. It is more of the perfunctory things these people need. We transformed the organization through the leadership. Man, when we start talking about the impact and the why of the organization, people bought into that. Then we transformed that out into the action. We did it pieces at a time. When we got that level of excitement up, then we attracted the funding.
Hugh: That’s the key. How can you say, “Give us money” when we haven’t really done the preparation on the front end?
Ed: They don’t know what your brand is. I don’t know if you got into talking about brand, but people don’t buy into a brand today unless they connect to it emotionally.
Hugh: One of the things that came up with both David Dunworth and David Corbin was that everybody in the organization represents the brand. Part of the engagement of the board is to understand what the brand promise, brand identity, and the brand pieces really are. How do they fairly represent the organization? It’s not done that way in most of the charities that I’ve seen. I don’t know about you, but there is a real connection of who you are and who you represent. Look at dragging off an airplane and you have Ann Coulter out of her seat. Ann Coulter missed a great opportunity. Delta was able to make it about her rather than their poor customer service. We won’t mention the airline, sorry. You can take a pic. Those are brand slaughter. It does damage organizationally.
All of this works together. It seems like it is an endless process with a lot of work. It is some heavy lifting and intense thinking. It is probably not as hard as most people make it.
Ed: No, when you do it as an evolution, it’s like raising your children. You won’t open things up to them overnight and have them understand all of their possibilities. It is an evolution, and that is why we go through a phase growth plan and have them continually update that. It keeps the vision fresh.
Back to the brand one more time. It’s the brand emotion. All brands emote. It took me years to convince software developers that their brands had emotion, but I finally won those battles in most of those organizations. Even in your charities and nonprofits, what is your brand? What is exciting about your brand? Why would I want to get attached? One thing about millennials is they coincidentally by 2020 will be 40% of the work force. By 2025, they will be north of 55 or 60%. We will be dealing with the people that are millennials. They have to understand the purpose, the emotion of your brand to get connected to it. I am not saying categorically, but maybe that is the problem with your churches. They are not connecting their brand emotionally.
Hugh: It is. Millennials will not substitute anything for integrity and authenticity. The boomers have done some disingenuous things, and millennials don’t want anything to do with it. Actually, my article in my magazine Nonprofit Professional Performance 360 is about the similarities between the boomers and the millennials.
We are going to wrap up here. Russ, I would like you to do a wrap-up on what you’ve heard. Russ has been taking notes on Ed Bogle sound bites. Then I will ask you, Ed, for your closing thoughts.
Russell Dennis, what do you have to say on the end of this interview?
Russell: This has all been good information. It’s very important to have a strategy; everything starts with strategy. You get nowhere if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s critical to have younger people engaged. Some of these issues I have seen as a veteran, going to veteran events and organizations, there are no veterans under 25 at any of these events. In my mind, that’s a problem. We see this across the spectrum. Your work has to mean something, or it does mean something. It means something to people out there. It’s getting connected to the people that the work means something to that is the challenge. That takes work. There is a lot of work that has to be done internally, and you constantly have to have an improvement system and constantly measure and monitor what you’re doing. You have to be excited about it because if you’re not excited about it, who will write you a check? They will not be excited about your work if you are not excited about it either. It’s really important.
When it comes to masterminds and mentoring, I like the idea of reverse mentoring: getting some of these millennials in to teach older guys like us about these processes and new things. There is an opportunity inside an organization to do reverse mentoring because we have to bridge that generation gap if you are going to be relevant down the road.
Hugh: Once again, Russell one-ups me. Ed, take us out. What are some closing thoughts for people? Thank you, Russ.
Ed: Strategy is the discipline. It’s part of your management process. It starts with your constituents and how you are going to serve them and how you are going to migrate it over time. Clearly understanding your brand and your emotion for them. That is where it all starts and stops. There was a brilliant guy, Theodore Leavitt, who was one of the founders of the real-marketing strategy world, who said a business, or even an organization for that matter, is all about finding and keeping a customer. You better take your constituents and understand them and your brand and what it represents to them.
Hugh: Great words. Ed, thank you for sharing lots of really useful stuff tonight.
Ed: Anybody that wants any further information on this, I am happy to share templates and stuff.
Hugh: Thanks, Ed, for being with us.
Ed: Thank you.
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Strategy - Driving to Abundance with Ed Bogle, Master Strategist | The Nonprofit Exchange: Leadership Tools & Strategies podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
