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Building the Knowledge Base of Nonprofit Management:
A Searchable Database
Mission, money, and merit: strategic decision making by non-profit managers
Abstract
Public and nonprofit organizations need to make strategic choices
about where to invest their resources. They also need to expose hidden
managerial assumptions and lack of adequate knowledge that prevent the
attainment of consensus in strategic decision making. The approach we
developed and tested in the field used a dynamic, three-dimensional
model that tracks individual programs in an organization's portfolio
on their contribution to mission, money, and merit. The first
dimension measures whether the organization is doing the right things;
the second, whether it is doing things right financially; and the
third, whether it doing things right in terms of quality. Senior
managers provide their own evaluations of the organization's programs.
Both the consensus view and the variation in individual assessments
contribute to an improved managerial understanding of the
organization's current situation and to richer discussions in
strategic decision making. In field tests, this visual model proved to
be a useful and powerful tool for illuminating underlying assumptions
and variations in knowledge among managers facing the complex,
multidimensional tradeoffs needed in strategic decision making.
Journal
(2004)
vol14
no3
pages325-342
Categories
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Financial Management
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Strategic Planning
