One thing that occurs to me is that your post assumes that the only way to address the issues raised here is to hire different people and/or give them different responsibilities. But another possible route is for EA organizations to make more use of management consultancies. That could be a path worth considering for small nonprofits whose leaders mainly do just want to hire someone to take care of all the tasks they don’t want to do themselves, and whose opportunity to make use of more strategic and advanced operations expertise is likely to be too sporadic to satisfy an experienced operations professional, especially one whose experience is mostly with larger organizations or companies and who is not strongly aligned with EA values. Said experienced ops pros could in turn perhaps do more of the work they want to do (and be better paid for it) working for a consultancy rather than in-house at a small organization.
I know there have been some efforts to get an EA-branded management consulting agency going since Luke’s post last year but am not aware of any of them hitting paydirt quite yet—happy to connect you or others interested to relevant people as appropriate. The main barrier as I understand it so far has been EA orgs’ lack of demonstrated demand for the services, but I wouldn’t necessarily take this as a signal that the resources are already there in-house or that there would be no benefit to the organizations from accessing them.
Well thanks for putting this brain worm into my ear. As I’m trying to make a decision between more project management for the Government or going back to the private sector, this looks very appealing.
One thing that occurs to me is that your post assumes that the only way to address the issues raised here is to hire different people and/or give them different responsibilities. But another possible route is for EA organizations to make more use of management consultancies. That could be a path worth considering for small nonprofits whose leaders mainly do just want to hire someone to take care of all the tasks they don’t want to do themselves, and whose opportunity to make use of more strategic and advanced operations expertise is likely to be too sporadic to satisfy an experienced operations professional, especially one whose experience is mostly with larger organizations or companies and who is not strongly aligned with EA values. Said experienced ops pros could in turn perhaps do more of the work they want to do (and be better paid for it) working for a consultancy rather than in-house at a small organization.
I know there have been some efforts to get an EA-branded management consulting agency going since Luke’s post last year but am not aware of any of them hitting paydirt quite yet—happy to connect you or others interested to relevant people as appropriate. The main barrier as I understand it so far has been EA orgs’ lack of demonstrated demand for the services, but I wouldn’t necessarily take this as a signal that the resources are already there in-house or that there would be no benefit to the organizations from accessing them.
Well thanks for putting this brain worm into my ear. As I’m trying to make a decision between more project management for the Government or going back to the private sector, this looks very appealing.