Business Agility, Social Media and the Power of Zilch

What can not-for-profit organizations teach for-profit businesses? In this time when some of our largest and best known companies have (accidently) become not-for-profit organizations because of their clumsy and dysfunctional operating models there are a lot of things for-profit businesses can learn from the not-for-profit world.

Learning to survive and thrive in tough environments where there is never enough money, or people, or time is a challenge that not-for-profit organizations have been wrestling with for a long time. Nancy Lublin, CEO of a not-for-profit named Do Something has written a book that shows companies how to do more with their brand, their people, their suppliers and their finances. The book is Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business.

In business we talk about being agile. Business agility is very much about embracing constraints and using them to guide us and motivate us. Agility is driven by constraints because if we have all the money and people and time we want then why would we need to be agile or do anything differently?

In the Land of the Blind the One Eyed Man is King

Nancy gets right to the point and tells it as she sees it, “Recently I was in a meeting at the offices of a ginormous global conglomerate. Eight of us sat around a big, beautiful table made of incredible wood no doubt harvested from some disappearing rain forest. A fancy phone in the middle of the table linked us to voices from three other cities…just the day before, the corporation’s media budget had been ‘slashed’... Everyone in the room was either dejected or in panic.” She pointed out that $1.5 million had been cut but they still had $2 million dollars. Yet instead of brainstorming ways to better leverage their remaining budget, they spent their time scheming about how to get more money from other sources to replace what was lost so they could continue operating as they always had.

When she suggested ways to use low cost social media and leverage sales channel and distribution partnerships and create newsworthy events around the product launch as ideas for stretching their budget, “They looked at me, silently, as if I had three eyes and six arms and were the firstborn spawn of beings from another planet.” At that point, she says, it occurred to her that perhaps she really was an alien from a weird place called “the Land of Zilch”. And she reminds us there are a lot of aliens from this land already among us; they are leaders and staff of not-for-profit organizations.

In an interview Nancy talked about how she started her first not-for-profit in 1996. It is an organization still in operation and now in 100 cities in eight countries. It’s called Dress for Success and it helps women transition from welfare to work by outfitting them with appropriate clothes for job interviews. Then when they get a job it provides them with a starter wardrobe of clothes for their new job. The organization collects these clothes as donations from other women who are better off and no longer need them.

Doing What Founders (or Entrepreneurs) Do So Well

She said, “I do what I think founders ought to do – build things that are sustainable and then move on.” In 2003 she moved on to turn around the organization called Do Something (also known as DoSomething.org). Their mission was and still is to empower teenagers to start projects and take action to improve their lives and their communities. When

Continue Reading