Mission, money, and merit: Strategic decision making by nonprofit managers

✍ Scribed by Kersti Krug; Charles B. Weinberg

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 147 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1048-6682
• DOI: 10.1002/nml.37

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Public and nonprofit organizations need to make strategic choices about where to invest their resources. They
also need to expose hidden managerial assumptions and lack of adequate knowledge that prevent the attainment of
consensus in strategic decision making. The approach we developed and tested in the field used a dynamic,
three‐dimensional model that tracks individual programs in an organization's portfolio on their
contribution to mission, money, and merit. The first dimension measures whether the organization is doing the right
things; the second, whether it is doing things right financially; and the third, whether it doing things
right in terms of quality. Senior managers provide their own evaluations of the organization's programs. Both
the consensus view and the variation in individual assessments contribute to an improved managerial understanding of
the organization's current situation and to richer discussions in strategic decision making. In field tests,
this visual model proved to be a useful and powerful tool for illuminating underlying assumptions and variations in
knowledge among managers facing the complex, multidimensional tradeoffs needed in strategic decision making.