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you demonstrate it through your written
actions, through every action you make.
If it’s really important to you to have that
value, you ask others for feedback about your
actions connecting to your values on a regular
basis. Take innovation: the willingness to be
creative and to experiment - if that’s a value,
it doesn’t just need to be stated; it needs to be
acted upon. If that’s something that enough
people at the board level and the senior team
level are willing to put resources behind, then
it’s for real. A board can measure willingness
to innovate or experiment in many different
ways, but it has to be measured.
Whatever is important to leaders in the
organization must be measured. Whatever
values you want to perpetuate must be
measured, otherwise it’s just a word on a
wall, as you said. We are what we measure.
I’ve been fortunate to have a foot in both the
for-profit world and the nonprofit world,
as an entrepreneur in both cases, and also
as a board member on nonprofit boards.
I’m as wild an entrepreneur, in the positive,
creative sense, as you can find. My experience
with nonprofits, and something I want to
avoid with Fuse Corps, is, very often, the
consensus-driven culture can really undercut
the desire to surface the truth, ask questions
that are tough but necessary for the purposes
of advancing the mission of an organization,
and willingness to have some creative conflict.
A lot of that stems from culture, but it goes
back to what’s measured.
On the corporate side, there’s plenty of
accountability because there are bottom lines.
On the nonprofit side, there can be such a
consensus-driven culture that everybody’s
very nice to each other and feeling good
about work, but there’s no accountability,
and there’s no level of urgency in the culture
to counterbalance that willingness to settle
for results that are not as good as could
be achieved if people are really pushing
themselves to the next level.
If we really want to move forward in bringing
benefit, we need to begin to hold ourselves
accountable to higher aspirations. As a whole,
the sector needs to stop worrying so much
about theory of change, and focus much
more on what you got done and how many
lives that impacted. We spend so much time
intellectualizing in the nonprofit world, and
in making sure that everybody feels good and
they’re onboard with everything, and we just
need to focus much more on our mission and
how we can hold ourselves accountable to
doing much better with what we have.
Peter Sims is an award-winning author and entrepreneur.
His latest book is
Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas
Emerge from Small Discoveries
. He is also the co-
author with Bill George of the best-seller
True North:
Discover Your Authentic Leadership
, a member of
General Electric’s Innovation Advisory Panel, an
Innosight Fellow, and co-founder of Fuse Corps, a social
venture that places entrepreneurial leaders on yearlong
grassroots projects with mayors and governors to tackle
some of America’s most pressing problems.
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