On Saturday I helped coordinate a board retreat for BookSpring, the organization of which I am now board president.

Like everyone else in the nonprofit universe, we think our 2009-2010 fiscal year will certainly be challenging. In our retreat, we talked much about execution vs. "ideas", and how we prioritize those items outside of the "duh" decisions. I still don't think we have clear black & white prioritization lines, but I was encourage to see that we are not the only ones with this struggle.

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From The Agitator
The UK-based Management Centre recently scored 57 nonprofits on their ability to innovate … a seven step process as conceptualized by the Centre:

Ideation — idea generation
Integration — cross-pollination of ideas
Information — external scanning & sourcing
Selection — identifying ideas to take forward
Support — develop ideas into offerings
Launch — bringing the idea to fruition and setting expectations re returns
Learning — establishing what can be improved and learned from

34 US charities were included, and their relative strengths were found to be Ideation and Information; their weakness was Launch. And we thought Americans were Do-ers!
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Wow. While I'd like to say I'm surprised, I'm not. In my experience, it's all about prioritization and execution, regardless of for-profit or non-for-profit status. Many times, we have more ideas than we know what to do with.

Successful organizations find the balance between sustainable, incremental growth while striving for stretch goals.

Maybe, and perhaps more importantly, successful leaders have the courage to say NO.