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One of my past projects is a finalist for the Harvard Business Review / McKinsey Management 2.0 Challenge. I am recruiting Wikimedians and everybody who cares about open collaboration in general and the Wikimedia movement in particular to help us win. From 2009-2010, I had the pleasure of designing and leading the Wikimedia strategic planning [...]
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years reflecting on where I am in my career, how I got here, and where I want to go. I find myself in a funny place. I still feel like I’m just getting started. I’m still hungry to learn and to play, to find fulfilling [...]
Harvard professor Joseph Nye wrote a nice brief piece in the Chronicle for Higher Education that talks about the U.S.’s evolving role as a world power and that articulates his distinction between hard and soft power. He writes: In the United States, we tend to focus on the hard power of coercion and payment. This [...]
My friend, Andrew, recently gave me the book, Scorecasting. Just started reading it (thank you, Kindle), and I came across this excerpt: Exploring the hidden side of sports reveals the following: That which is recognizable or apparent is often given too much credit, whereas the real answer often lies concealed. Incentives are powerful motivators and [...]
This morning, I was reminded of two reasons why I love working openly, and why everyone should do more of it. First, I noticed this tweet from Stephanie McAuliffe: The Organizational Effectiveness group at the Packard Foundation has been quietly capturing its learnings on an open, public wiki for over a year now. In a [...]
I spent the day processing everything that’s been happening over the past week, work-wise: I spent two days at the Network of Network Funders meeting, thinking with and listening to a group of funders who are trying to apply network-thinking in the nonprofit space I also spent a lot of time on my primary project [...]
Yesterday was the first day of the Network of Network Funders gathering. It was my kind of gathering — great crowd, thoughtful conversations, strong design (a Diana Scearce staple), incredible stories. Wanted to share three observations from yesterday: Holding the tension. Working with networks from a position of traditional, institutional power is a tricky business. [...]
The best thing I read this week was Sean Stannard-Stockton‘s blog post, “An Investment Approach to Philanthropy.” In it, he articulated a favorite theme of his — strategic versus tactical philanthropy — in a way that felt very clear to me. Here’s my two line summary: Strategic philanthropy is about trying to solve social problems [...]
I’ve served on the board of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) for four years now, and I recently became the board chair. The thing I love most about LLC is how it models its principles. It doesn’t just talk about how leadership should be. It practices it, and it shares its learnings, both good and [...]
A few months ago, I sat down to a meeting with Kristin Cobble, Gwen Gordon, and Rebecca Petzel. We were all on our laptops, pulling up notes and sending off last minute emails. As the meeting was about to start, we all closed our laptops with a deep breath, looked at each other for a [...]
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