Home Runs and Strikeouts in a Social Enterprise (eBook)

A Leadership Memoir

James M. McClelland (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
156 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-0831-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Starting out young and inexperienced, but with entrepreneurial inclinations and a desire to create opportunities for others who were less fortunate to improve their lives, Jim McClelland led Goodwill Industries in central Indiana for 41 years. During those four decades, the Indianapolis-based organization grew and evolved into a large, diversified social enterprise that employed over 3,000 people, two-thirds of them with barriers such as a significant disability, felony record, or lack of a high school diploma. In addition, Goodwill operated 12 public charter high schools designed for adults who lacked a diploma, offered a nurse home visitation program for first-time moms in low income households, and linked employment, education, health, and other services in a whole-person, often whole-family approach for greater lasting impact. As he approached retirement in 2015, Jim identified 104 significant initiatives the organization had undertaken during his career, and he classified them in baseball terms. There were 10 home runs - eight with bases loaded, 18 strikeouts, a lot of singles, and a few doubles. But the impact of those eight grand slam home runs far exceeded the net cumulative impact of all the other initiatives. In this book Jim describes much of what worked, some of the initiatives that didn't, and leadership lessons he learned as both he and the organization grew. He also describes how the organization adapted to dramatic changes in the economy, demographics, technology, competition, laws and regulations, and to some geopolitical shocks during his career. Material in this book will be of particular interest to leaders and aspiring leaders of for-profit and not-for-profit social enterprises, and much of it is applicable in other businesses as well.

Textauszug

Chapter 1
Background

Well over 100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th Century, Edgar Helms, a Methodist minister, saw a human need and developed a not-for-profit commercial means to fill that need and accomplish a societal “good.” Seeking a practical way to help the thousands of unemployed immigrants in the south end slums of Boston in those days, Helms collected clothing, furniture, and household items people no longer wanted, put unemployed people to work repairing the goods, and sold them to the public. Money from the sales was used to pay wages to the workers. The organization he created, Goodwill Industries, is now composed of over 150 locally governed and managed community based not-for-profit organizations that collectively constitute one of the largest networks of charitable organizations in the world.

Each local Goodwill is a member of Goodwill Industries International, Inc. (GII) and operates within a GII-assigned geographic territory. While GII has certain requirements of all Goodwills, including how the name and marks may be used, the locals have almost complete freedom in how they operate, what services to provide, their policies and procedures, etc. The degree of autonomy each Goodwill has results in enormous variability from one Goodwill to another. They most definitely are not all alike.

This structure has advantages and disadvantages. Among the disadvantages are inconsistency in the scope of services offered and wide variation in performance from one locale to another. It is also enormously difficult to generate economies of scale that might be possible with a different structure.

On the other hand, independent community based Goodwills do have the ability to customize their services and approaches to best suit their community. They also have opportunities to learn a lot from the different approaches and experiences of other Goodwills. Importantly from my perspective, that freedom at the local level is what enabled the Indianapolis-based organization to evolve differently from any other Goodwill during the early years of the 21st Century.

The geographic limitations that are placed on each local Goodwill can also result in a tendency to over-diversify as a means of generating growth. Not all Goodwills do that, but as will become obvious later in this book, we did have that tendency – especially in the 1980s and into the 1990s. We didn’t know what we couldn’t do, and we tried many ways to grow our businesses. Through trial and error, though, we eventually arrived at what I viewed as an optimal, sustainable level of diversification that led to something approaching optimal impact.

I was CEO of that central Indiana Goodwill organization for more than four decades. However, if, when I graduated from Georgia Tech, anyone had told me I would spend 45 of the next 50 years working as an executive for Goodwill Industries, I would have considered them delusional. And if they had told me that this fifth-generation Floridian would spend nearly all those years living and working in Indianapolis, that would have removed all doubt. Yet, I cannot imagine a career that would have been a better fit with my value system and whatever abilities I might have. Neither can I imagine a city that would have been more supportive of what we were trying to do than was Indianapolis.

I have had a number of friends around the country who also found a great career fit with Goodwill. We have differed in backgrounds, temperaments, and leadership styles, and different paths led us to Goodwill. Yet, despite the differences, for those of us who served multiple decades as Goodwill CEOs, there was something unique about the fit. Part of it, I believe, is that most of us had some entrepreneurial instincts, and we loved having the opportunity to run businesses that had a strong mission component.

Peter Drucker wrote that most successful careers are not planned, and mine certainly wasn’t. Drucker believed that most successful careers are generally a result of understanding what your values are, what you do well, what you don’t do well, the kinds of situations you work best in, and the kinds of situations you don’t work well in. Then you try to find a fit with all of that.

My path is a good example of what Drucker described, and I was extraordinarily fortunate to find at a relatively early age (26) what for me was a nearly ideal fit. I had the same position for the last 41 years of my career, but the job itself changed phenomenally. I believe organizations and their key people need to grow at about the same rate. If one gets too far ahead of the other, there will be problems. The organization I was privileged to lead and I personally generally kept pace with each other’s growth – not always exactly in sync, but usually with positive results.

But while we grew a lot, we also evolved into something far better than I had even imagined. The resulting impact of the work we were doing was particularly significant during the fifteen years before I retired and made the last part of my career by far the most rewarding. I loved what our organization had become.

I’ve been in a lot of leadership positions in my life. In addition to being CEO of a large, diversified not-for-profit organization, I’ve served on the boards of a lot of other not-for-profit organizations at local, national, and international levels and chaired several of them. Included among those was a joint venture between a U.S.-based organization and a U.K.-based charity.

One of the ironies in my life, though, is that I never sought any of the paid or unpaid leadership positions I’ve had as an adult. The only leadership positions I ever really sought were in high school. Even when I first contacted Goodwill back in 1970, I was looking for a place where I could use my industrial engineering skills in a way that might give me the kind of personal satisfaction I had enjoyed doing some volunteer tutoring in the basement of a church in downtown Washington D.C. while I was completing my military service.

One reason Goodwill interested me was its emphasis on providing jobs for people who, because of their disabilities, had fewer options than most. That interest had been stimulated by an experience I had while living in Washington D.C. in the late 1960s – a time of much social ferment in the U.S. While there, I got to know people from all parts of the country – people who had different backgrounds, perspectives, and world views than I had grown up with. They read different books from those I typically read, and they caused me to ask questions about issues I had never really thought about. But the answers I got to some of those questions – sometimes from unexpected places – at times had a profound and lasting impact on me.

For example, my parents were living in the Orlando area, where my dad was an officer in a company that sold and serviced road building and construction equipment. One evening when I was home visiting my parents I somewhat naively asked my dad, “Tell me, what does your company do for society?” He calmly replied, “Well, for starters, we provide a livelihood for 125 people and their families.” I felt about one foot tall and wondered how I could have been so dumb as not to see that. Subsequently, through what turned out to be a very long career with Goodwill, hardly a week went by that I didn’t think about that incident, as the organization I led employed a lot of people who not only had limited options, but over half of them were the primary source of income in their households. That placed an enormous responsibility on those of us in leadership positions to run the organization as well as possible so we could continue providing a livelihood for all those people who were counting on us. And we did not take that responsibility lightly.

In 1970, though, that was still to come as I considered my employment options. Finally, after six months of recruitment by what was then Goodwill Industries of America and procrastinating by me, I agreed to enter Goodwill’s then-two-year-long executive training program under the mentorship of Bill Lufburrow, CEO of the Houston Goodwill. That decision involved taking a 25% pay cut and turning down two other job offers, each of which would have paid me 40% more than Goodwill. I also made a four-year commitment to work for Goodwill.

That is probably not what most people would have done. But remember, I’m the fifth-generation Floridian who has subsequently made Indianapolis home for nearly five decades. I’ve frequently not gone the more conventional route, and I’ve never regretted that. It’s probably not surprising that I don’t recall getting any career advice when I was a kid. But I was so independent-minded I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to it anyway.

The driving force behind my decision to go to work for Goodwill was a faith-based desire to use whatever skills I had to benefit others less fortunate. While I did not aspire to be a leader, I did aspire to serve. I have never been interested in having power or control for its own sake, but throughout my adult life I have always been interested in accomplishing something worthwhile and creating something good that would outlast me.

In Houston, the executive training program under Bill Lufburrow could best be described as sink or swim. He was a charismatic visionary, big thinker, and superb orator, frequently described by others as impetuous, impatient, exasperating, exciting, unpredictable, unstoppable, fast moving, and fun. He loved change. I experienced that firsthand when, the first three times I left town after going...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.11.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-0831-1 / 1667808311
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-0831-4 / 9781667808314