Organizational WHYs

I often get asked the question about the
why in for-profit organizations versus
not-for-profit organizations so before I
answer the question let me just take a
little aside I hate the term
not-for-profit I hate the idea that an
organization and a group of people are
defining their purpose based on what
they’re not we have to stand for
something not against things
the reality is not-for-profit is a tax
delineation and that’s why we use the
term
and not-for-profits absolutely have an
idea of profit except it’s defined
differently in a for-profit organization
profit is defined in money and a
not-for-profit organization profit is
defined by whatever you’re trying to
accomplish so for example if your
objective is to rescue kittens out of
trees then you better be profitable you
better be risking more kittens out of
trees this month then you were last
month let’s call them for impact
organizations so we have for-profit
organizations and we have for impact
organizations okay now back to the
question the why is different and
sometimes how do we compare the whys of
for-profit versus for impact
organizations here’s generally what I’ve
seen for impact organizations are pretty
good at articulating their why where
they’re weak is in their house the
structures in which they use to advance
their cause I mean definitions as we’ve
just discussed is one of them for-profit
organizations tend to be really good at
how and pretty weak in why in other
words they’re really good at process
that really good at operations but the
sense of higher purpose on higher cause
since it seems to be lacking so what
both organizations can learn to do is
learn from each other in other words for
impact organizations can learn to
bolster operations from for-profit at
for-profit could learn a little bit
about working towards a higher cause
from for impact organizations they
should look the same
remember it’s the definition it’s just a
metric that is different but the
organization should feel the same to
work there in other words we should feel
like we’re part of something bigger than
ourselves and it should be a well-oiled
machine and we should have good metrics
to help us feel like we’re moving the
ball down the playing field back to the
fore impact organizations because there
were poor metrics and because they do
not define
for impact unfortunately the metric
becomes too much about money and raising
money and less about understanding how
far we’re moving the ball down the field
with whatever we’re trying to accomplish
so there we go