ABSTRACT
Starting with the mission and its requirements may be the first lesson business can learn from successful nonprofits. The best nonprofits devote a great deal of thought to defining their organization’s mission. They avoid sweeping statements full of good intentions and focus, instead, on objectives that have clear-cut implications for the work their members—staff and volunteers— perform. Nonprofits also start with the environment, the community, the “customers” to be; they do not, as American businesses tend to do, start with the inside that is, with the organization or with financial returns. Many nonprofits have what is the exception in business— a functioning board. They also have something even rarer: a chief executive officer who is clearly accountable to the board and whose performance is reviewed annually by a board committee. More and more volunteers are educated people in managerial or professional jobs—some preretirement men and women in their fifties, even more baby boomers who are reaching their mid-thirties or forties.
