The Harvard Business Review blog posted a couple of weeks ago on some findings from a massive ten-year study of management practices, and identified three in particular that seem most associated with successful mid-sized companies: a) ruthless monitoring and continuous improvements across their entire process, b) establishing challenging performance targets for their employees, and c) energetically incentivizing and rewarding high performers and weeding out underperformers. It’s interesting but not surprising that – as far as we can tell – not one of these practices is pervasive among nonprofits.  It’s easy to come up with excuses for why these practices don’t easily apply to nonprofit organizations.  It’s much harder, and I’ll wager a lot more useful, to figure how they do apply.
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