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The Art of the Long View

Peter Schwartz's methods of scenario planning have become very popular in the last decade, based in part on the success of his consulting firm, Global Business Network. Personally, I find it to be a great implementation of a crucial insight: We don't really know what the future will bring. In practice, unfortunately, it often leads to an overly reactive model of strategic planning, but if you read Schwartz's book on the method, The Art of the Long View, you'll know that it's instead meant to encourage strategic flexibility. In a time when I see most nonprofit project plans embrace simple linear projections of the future, this is still a very valuable lesson. Posted: 8/24/05; 9:48:53 AM #

The Rights of Authors, Artists, and Other Creative People

Despite being terribly out of date when it comes to the Internet and some recent draconian changes in copyright law, from time to time I still turn to the basic ACLU guide to author and artist rights, The Rights of Authors, Artists, and Other Creative People. Unfortunately, this topic has been of some legal interest to me recently, but in a broader sense it's of relevance to any organization who is in the business of ideas. Posted: 8/24/05; 9:43:42 AM #

The Balanced Scorecard

Sometimes you need a compelling buzzword or phrase in order to help organizations do the obvious. In the Nineties, Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard did just that. They emphasized that there were four parts of an organization that required equal attention: financials, internal business processes, learning and growth, and stakeholder (or customer) relations. More importantly their book provided a method for scoring an organization's progress in those four areas, leading to a framework that is today very widely practices as a means of evaluation in both the for profit and nonprofit world. My major misgiving with the method is how it manages to leave out actual outcomes in the world. Posted: 8/24/05; 9:41:23 AM #