Remember when we talked about a ‘mouse’ as a rodent and we used ‘kindle’ as a verb? When ‘apple’ was a type of cider you drank on a crisp fall day and ‘Amazon’ evoked the sound of howler monkeys and images of a fecund rainforest teeming with fast-growing vines?
The digital revolution is rapidly transforming our vocabulary. Just when I start using ‘blog’ and ‘tweet’ in everyday conversations, new terms like ‘cloud technology’ and ‘crowd sourcing’ sprout around me. It’s fun to try and keep up. Every day I remind myself that opting out is like choosing Morse code – a language of dots and dashes from a bygone era.
The lexicon of our sector is changing as well. Take Mark Kramer’s notion of ‘catalytic philanthropy,’ Matthew Bishop and Michael Green’s promotion of ‘philanthrocapitalism,’ and Lucy Bernholz’s exceptional work on ‘disrupting philanthropy.’ Each identified key elements of practice or fast- moving trends that funders might heed to achieve real impact. They have assessed existing structures and sought to make them even stronger. In doing so, they created a new vocabulary for thinking about philanthropy.
You may or may not agree with the fundamental premise of these approaches or others that come across your desk. (To find out where I stand, please read my address at the Donors Forum of South Florida conference in Miami.) Nonetheless, it’s useful to step back periodically and assess what developments might help your organization make an even greater contribution. Experiment with online competitions, visual mapping technology, or social media. Pluck out key ideas that ‘disrupt philanthropy’ or interrupt your usual way of doing things and tailor them to your mission. Doing so may help you fine tune your business model or tighten up how you measure impact. You decide – but if you ignore the ways our sector is evolving, you may find yourself speaking a language of dots and dashes that fewer and fewer people understand.
When Model Ts started rolling off Henry Ford’s newly-invented assembly line, there were many buggy whip makers. As fewer horse-drawn carriages rolled down America’s streets and country lanes, there must have been fierce competition among the buggy whip makers. But what became of the very last manufacturer? Does it matter much if he was producing the highest-quality buggy whip in town when they are no longer needed?
Consider another example. Today we can read the latest news online and even customize it to meet our personal and professional interests. Newspaper publishers would have been wise to consider this dilemma more carefully when the Internet was created, rather than watching readers migrate en masse to computers. Or think about the changes afoot in the book world. On one hand, millions of readers lined up to buy the latest book in the Millennium Trilogy by Swedish author, Stieg Larsson. On the other hand, Amazon announced last December that for the first time ever more customers bought e-books than printed books.
I’m not suggesting that nonprofits are becoming obsolete. But our world is changing fast and in ways that render some of our systems and operations outdated. President Kennedy said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” As we look to the future, it’s apparent that our sector’s long-term sustainability as currently structured is in question. Charitable giving has not kept pace with the growth in numbers and size of nonprofits over the last quarter century. We have expanded around a paradigm that will not allow us to thrive in the coming decade, given the immense challenges facing our world.
Andrew Hargadon teaches at the
University of California in Davis and is a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. Some weeks ago, I heard him speak about his book, “How Breakthroughs Happen.” Despite what we might think, inventions like the light bulb or transistor radio don’t come from sudden “aha” moments. Breakthroughs come from synthesizing divergent ideas and then making them widely accessible to the public in a whole new way – going to scale as we say. After observing sewing machines, the meat packing industry, and Campbell Soup, Henry Ford invented the assembly line. The car was a big idea, of course, but the assembly line revolutionized manufacturing and ushered in the machine age.
Let us open our eyes to the new ideas swirling around the community. Let us listen to the new vocabulary seeping into our professional lives. Let us take stock of emerging approaches and grab hold of those ideas filled with new promise for doing our work more effectively in the future. To do otherwise is to duck our sacred duty of investing the precious resources entrusted to us to pursue the common good and improve people’s lives.
