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| Re: Corporate CEO to nonprofit Executive Director
Posted by carl   on 3/5/2009, 10:50 pm, in reply to "Corporate CEO to nonprofit Executive Director"
VIP Poster
Hi,
Perhaps the National Center for Charitable Statistics will have some information. You can find them online.
My personal observation is that corporate CEOs (whether they come from private corporations or from major government entities such as the Army) corporate CEOs do not often understand the subtle but vast differences between the cash-profit and social profit institutions.
In a corporation, progress is measured by a simple accumulation of dollars that can be counted like points. If your corporation is selling widgets well, your profit margins are going up, then you as the CEO are in good shape.
When things are not so rosy, your job is in jeopardy.
In the nonprofit world, the CEO position is just a precarious for vastly different reasons. Social profit is not quite so simple to count. Have you ever tried to quantify a mentor program? a substance abuse recovery agency? a library?
I firmly believe in numbers, but in the nonprofit world, numbers tell only one part of the story. A budget is simply a written plan for operating or growing an organization; just as important is the progress against a well-considered strategic plan; just as important is the impact a teacher makes on one isolated child. You can't always quantify impact. Without impact, a nonprofit is wasting its time.
You can't always figure time and effort against results. Many programs show seemingly small results but make huge impacts on the limited number of people they serve.
For my two cents, the greatest disadvantage to hiring a corporate CEO is that he or she might not truly understand the way a nonprofit works and may not be able to calculate success in realistic terms.
Hope this helps,
Carl
Richardson Development
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