At the risk of piling on the beatification bandwagon, an interesting post from the good folks at Harvard Business Review. The author argues that Jobs solved (Clayton Christensen’s) Innovator's Dilemma upon returning from the wilderness, citing the radical changes he made at Apple. You know the ending: the case of Jobs and Apple is an excellent illustration of the difficulty, rarity and reward of “solving the dilemma.” I was equally struck, however, by some of the language employed. He notes (emphasis mine): Apple talks a lot about its … [Read more...]
Who Is Governing Whom? Senior Managers, Governance and the Structure of Generosity in Large U.S. Firms
Interesting new research from Christopher Marquis and Matthew Lee at Harvard Business School on key structural drivers of corporate philanthropy: gender of senior managers, CEO tenure and board structure all have an impact on a firm's generosity...and you may find some of them counter-intuitive. Corporate philanthropy is highest in corporations with new CEOs, and decreases with the length of CEO tenure. The greater the proportion of female senior managers in a company, the greater the corporate philanthropic contributions will … [Read more...]
Disrupting Philanthropy 2.0
An overview of how technology is being used in philanthropy. The foundation activities are pretty well known. However, there are good examples of where experimentation is happening, and interesting activities happening outside established institutions. The effect of technology on philanthropy comes across as marginal today, but the tech trends & experiments point to what we can expect in 3-5 years, when the experiments become mainstream and the underlying tech is mature and "dull." Disrupting Philanthropy 2.0. … [Read more...]
The Cost of Information Sharing in Philanthropy | Tactical Philanthropy
The argument here is that there isn't -- and shouldn't be -- any conflict in the not-for-profit sector between the social benefit and the personal gain from information and intellectual property. Why? Because the not-for-profit professional's goal *is* social benefit, and therefore the professional wants to and must give away all information so society can do the most with it. Those who do otherwise are engaging in "a form of corruption," as stated in one of the comments. I think the argument made in this piece is incomplete (email me if … [Read more...]