book review: the nonprofit strategy revolution
25 Feb 2022
What are the main ideas?
- 3-year strategic plans don’t work. they take too long to develop, they are outdated almost as soon as they are finished, and they rarely have their intended impact on any organization
- 3-year strategic plans don’t actually help organizations strategize because we live in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, chaotic, ambiguous) world that moves faster than they can
- it doesn’t make sense to take 18 months to create a 3-year strategic plan
- strategy development is best done in an on-going way
- implementing your strategy is a different step than creating it
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
create a strategy screen and use it to help make decisions for some other part of my life.
How would I describe the book to a friend?
this book is half exposition and half tools. the exposition itself is only about 100 pages very much worth the read. it’s especially worth it if you’re working in nonprofits and interested in making them more effective. the tools at the back are useful if you’re going to implement the methodology. but even if you’re not interested in working with his actual framework, the theory is excellent. the chapters about organizational strategy are incredible. the ones about programmatic and operational strategy are less illuminating and still have many good insights. i am recommending this book to many of my nonprofit friends who are in the process of or consulting for other developing 3-year strategic plans.
all that praise spoken, it’s a little outdated at this point. adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, for example, has less written analysis of the contextual issue of 3-year strategic planning, but takes pushes strategy thinking to a whole other plane. i love this book for its critique and will implement some of the tools but integrate the thinking.
reminder: book review structure
words / writing / post-processing
315w / 12min / 3min