Becoming a High-Performance Nonprofit

Success is difficult, sustaining success is even tougher, and the path to success is to become a high performance nonprofit.  High performance involves more than delivering your mission and generating revenue. It requires spending scarce time and money on examining and improving how your organization works. Success relies on the following actions:

1. Maintain a Strategic Focus: Know yourself.

2. Understand Your Key Stakeholders: And managing them all.

3. Collaborate like Crazy: Break down your silos and fiefdoms.

4. Commit to Continuous Improvement: As the world changes so must you.

5. Invest in Human Capital: In the end it’s all about people.

This interactive session will share stories of many organizations that have used these critical steps to move forward to become high-performance nonprofits. Please be prepared to participate.

About the Speaker

Steven Stanton is a leading management thinker and consultant to Fortune 500 companies. He has spent the past decade working with nonprofits to share what he has learned from the successes and failures of his clients.

Mr. Stanton is co-author, with Dr. Michael Hammer, of the New York Times bestselling Reengineering Revolution and the Harvard Business Review article “How Process Organizations Really Work.”  He recently published the book Smart Work: Why Organizations Full of Intelligent People Do So Many Dumb Things and What You Can Do About It, which describes why many organizations fail at transformation and provides pragmatic recommendations for performance improvement.  He has also written numerous articles on business transformation and been cited frequently by national publications such as Fortune and BusinessWeek.

Mr.  Stanton’s experience also includes conducting over 30 multi-day courses on Process Redesign and Change Management, and teaching in executive education programs at major corporations and goverment organizations.  He was a long-time board member of Community Action Partners (CAP), a non-profit that places HBS and HKS alumni into pro bono consulting projects in the Boston area.