The Charitable Challenge
Submitted by Steve on June 15, 2011
Philanthropic donors need to understand that “overhead” should not be considered a dirty word when it comes to nonprofit organizations. From Rick Wartzman at Bloomberg Businessweek:
I once heard that, 22 years ago, when Peter Drucker wrote the Harvard Business Review article, “What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits,” some thought that the magazine had committed a colossal typo and gotten it backward. Surely it meant to say: “What Nonprofits Can Learn from Business.”
Although I suspect this story is apocryphal, clearly Drucker was way ahead of his time in identifying the social sector as an arena in which many of its foremost organizations are every bit as well run as the most successful corporations.