10/02/1995 Park Board Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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t -y. HBR:In 1990,Peter Drucker referred to the Nature about it, but nobody knew whether it was true or i Conservancy as "the best example of a winning false or what we should do about it. strategy in a nonprofit institution." Yet you are leading the organization through significant How did you come to believe that you might have change. Was Drucker wrongi a problem? _ I John Sawhill: Sometimes an organization is slow Our experience with Schenob Brook in Massa- to accept change because it's doing so well. Peter chusetts,for example,helped to alert us.A number i Drucker was a teacher of mine, and one of the of years after we had acquired that property, we things he said to me was that the worst thing that were alarmed to find that the bog turtle population could happen to any organization is 40 years of un- was declining. It turned out that activities outside broken success. our preserve were affecting the water that the tur- "We're concentrating more on strategies that address what col issue of the 1990s: integrating economic growth with env r 0111 The Conservancy has always had a very clear ties ultimately depended on.Here was the problem: mission:to preserve plants and animals and special We thought we could buy a piece of land, fence it habitats that represent the diversity of We.We are off, and thereby protect whatever was in that pre- completely focused on that mission;it drives eve ' I p y every- serve. But that thinking proved mistaken, which thing we do. We had to change, though, because meant that our old performance measures—such as f while we were doing a lot of good conservation how much land we had acquired for conservation— work,there were more and more signs that we were weren't valid indicators of institutional progress.. r not making significant progress toward accom- We simply couldn't go on with business-as-usual. € plishing our mission. For-profit companies can look at their financial s statements every day to see how they're doing: Your mission wasn't conservation? They're either making money or not. Without the b discipline of the bottom line,it's easier for nonprof- F Our mission hasn't changed; our approach has. it organizations to get off track. For the Conser- l� You might call our original approach a Noah's Ark vancy,science is really our bottom line. t� strategy.For four decades,the Conservancy focused And science led us to our new strategy.It became 'h j almost exclusively on setting aside critical habitats clear that we needed to influence land use in larger >: o for endangered species.In practice,that meant buy- areas surrounding the kinds of core preserves that '? ti ing the specific piece of wetlands, forest, or prairie we had traditionally acquired. Now we focus on _ ti that supported a particular species or natural com- much larger landscapes, areas we call Last Great t} munity.Like Noah,the Conservancy was intent on Places. That way we can work to ensure that the i di building an ark—or, more accurately, building a lot economic and recreational activities going on out- of little arks. side the preserves don't undermine the balance of of That approach was easily measurable.In the past, life inside them. sit whenever we wanted to know how we were doing, ur we could simply count the acres we'd protected and How did you arrive at this new approach? to check our membership figures.By those traditional to measures of success, we were doing just fine. But When I joined the Conservancy in 1990, the first ra, we started to realize that those measures weren't thing I did was to initiate a review of our strategy. tic giving us the right information. We had a terrific Like most other environmental organizations, we ab collection of preserves,but there was growing con- had grown rapidly in the 1980s. Some of the basic' : i pa cern about the lasting effectiveness of our conser- systems we were using to run the enterprise hadn't I ce vation strategy.The more we looked at the scientific kept up with that growth:Our financial system was data, the more we became concerned that our arks not producing reports on time our marketing s s pa. were springing leaks. In other words, places we tern was not giving us accurate,up-to-date informa- In. tol thought were protected really weren't.That wasn't tion on our members, and our personnel systems= po. a sudden revelation.People in the field were talking were antiquated.In addition,the board of governors:,, tog 110 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW September-October 1995?' I