The Unnecessary Prospect of Nonprofit 101
Is management of a nonprofit so different from that of for-profit firms that it needs to be taught separately? Both higher education and nonprofit organizations themselves seem to think so, according to the NonProfit Times:
Formal education and advanced degrees in nonprofit and philanthropy studies, once a rather far-fetched idea, are here to stay. What might prove to be more important to the nonprofit sector, however, is that institutional support for nonprofit executives and staff seeking such education is catching on.
Results of a study released by Roseanne M. Mirabella, a professor in the Political Science Department at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., show that at least 255 colleges and universities in the United States offer advanced degrees or certificates that involve some aspect of philanthropy/nonprofit studies, primarily nonprofit management.
I’m a former higher ed guy who still does a lot of work for colleges and universities, so I come to the table with a lot of affinity for the academy, but I’m not convinced of how necessary this is. Management is about putting the right people in the right situations to succeed; it’s about establishing a structure conducive to effective behavior. And I don’t think that changes materially when the institution in question is a nonprofit, even conceding the vast differences between how it and its corporate sibling conduct their respective businesses.
Hat tip to Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog and Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy.
I’m likewise a veteran of the academy, and as skeptical about new academic disciplines as the next guy; but if we’re prepared to concede that there is such a thing as useful business education, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to concede that the most useful such education acknowledges the special qualities of the organizations people are actually going to run. That’s why MBA programs offer sub-disciplinary concentration in marketing or finance–because running one component of a business enterprise is really quite different from running another. And nonprofits aren’t just businesses with weird bookkeeping–they’re businesses which deplete capital when they succeed, while for-profits deplete capital when they fail. They’re businesses whose essential governing decisions are made by untrained and uncompensated volunteers who are supposed to be simultaneously representatives of a community and sources of capital. And they’re businesses operating without a working capital market. All those special characteristics, it seems to me, justify the rigorous analysis a business-school education can (at its best) provide.
Welcome to the conversation, NP, and thanks for your thoughts. That’s a very interesting way to break it down.