For several years, Goodwill of North Georgia has been sending its incoming chair to the HBS Executive Education program, Governing for Nonprofit Excellence (GNE). During 2014, Bill Miller, the current board director and treasurer, asked if he could attend as well. In this interview, Miller explains how the program not only provided valuable frameworks for rethinking and improving the organization's board governance process, but also connected him with fellow board directors across the country who face similar challenges.
I have been on the board of Goodwill of North Georgia, whose mission is to "put people to work," for about eight years now. I came to the GNE program to find new frameworks for rethinking our challenges and to find way to improve our board governance processes.
The program and the cases helped me think through difficult problems, which boards sometimes don't take the time to do. I have a lot of experience with for-profit company boards in different industries, but not nearly as much experience in the nonprofit world. Looking around the room and learning that other people have had these same challenges was reassuring. I thought, "Maybe there's something to be learned from their experience and even some relationships to be leveraged."
I hadn't really given a lot of thought to all the different organizations that would be in the room. Everybody came representing a nonprofit with their own set of successes and challenges, and that made for a much more meaningful conversation about the case-studies. I had never participated in a learning environment like that on the not-for-profit side, so I found that very valuable on top of the classroom case study.
The energy and passion that the faculty bring stimulates everyone in the classroom, especially in an environment where a lot of people haven't ever engaged in intensive discussions like this. Because it's a three-day program, you need to get off on the right foot fast. The faculty's enthusiasm for the topic certainly helped to bring us all up to speed very quickly and made the case-study method very effective.
The faculty put forth a number of different models that give you a framework for thinking about your challenges and your organization. You don't have to force-fit your organization into a framework, but it does help you address your challenges more methodically. You can go back to the framework, recall the case study, and apply it to what you do. I'll definitely do that around our board governance process.
There were a number of Goodwill organizations represented, and I tried to talk to each of them to get their take on a number of things. Even a 15-minute conversation was valuable. I know that executive directors and CEOs of Goodwills around the country talk to each other, but the board members across Goodwills don't do that. Now I can just flip through the class roster, choose a name, and say, "Remember that conversation? Do you mind if I pick your brain on that?"
