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Sometimes the voices at play in this sector sound like Gilda Radner’s character, Emily Litella, from the old days of Saturday Night Live. “What’s all this I hear about abundance?” These days, we seem to hear about abundance more and more: Building on strengths Seeing the glass as half full Asset-based work Seeing community potential [...]
These days, this sector is filled with talk of evaluation and measurement and metrics. As consultants to community benefit / nonprofit organizations, we are often the ones encouraging our clients to measure their performance. We teach clients how to move from measuring “outputs” to “outcomes” – the results that matter for their clients and their [...]
As consultants we are frequently encouraging our clients to “walk the talk” of their values. In particular, we are encouraging transparency – one of the many overused buzzwords this young century has promulgated. It’s one thing to encourage our clients to walk their talk. It’s a whole ‘nother thing to walk that talk ourselves as [...]
NOTE: The chat scheduled for April 20 has been rescheduled to April 27 (see sidebar on right) due to a failure of Twitter’s search function. See you all next week! Perhaps it’s the changing economy. Or perhaps this has always been the $64,000 question. But these days, everywhere we turn, we seem to hear the [...]
For as long as I’ve been a consultant – going on 20 years – there has been background chatter about licensing consultants. The same words are always used when that discussion arises: “Anyone can hang out a shingle and say they are a consultant.” And the fact is, that is completely true. One doesn’t have [...]
If you are consulting to Community Benefit / “Nonprofit” Organizations in these difficult economic times, there is a good chance you are being asked to help them “survive” in some way. If you are good at what you do, you may be working with them to aim beyond survival, on towards sustainability. And if you [...]
We could think of no better topic to head into the holidays than “The Fun Theory!” Inspired by the video at the end of this post (and the wonderful other videos sponsored by Volkswagen here), we were approached by our guest co-moderator for this week’s chat, Kristen Parrinello, who suggested the topic. Thanks, Kristen (aka [...]
If you think the topic of pricing is sticky for consultants in general, try being a consultant to Community Benefit Organizations! In the business world, clients might ask you to reduce your fee, but would they even consider asking you to do the work for free? And yet Community Benefit Consultants face that situation all [...]
Research by Dr. Barry Schwartz (as he described at TED here) has shown that neither rules nor incentives are as powerful in motivating us to be our very best as is the desire to be virtuous, to do what is right by other people. Dr. Schwartz talks about this as the practical wisdom each of [...]
One of the most interesting conversations we continually face is the question of competition vs. collaboration. We hear drumbeats for organizations to cooperate, collaborate. And then we hear drumbeats, just as loud, that suggest “competition is a source of innovation.” A conversation at Social Edge has been going on for over a month on this [...]