Mission driven strategy

How can nonprofit organizations achieve superior performance? This column discusses Mission Driven Strategy, a set of guidelines for designing, developing, and evaluating strategy aimed at maximum, mission-based value creation. What is Mission Driven Strategy? It's a framework adapted from Return

Driven Strategy (see February 2002 column) that is based on the strategic activities of some of the best companies in the world. In executive workshops and board presentations at nonprofit organizations, the tenets and foundations of Mission Driven Strategy have helped management and board members to understand and refine strategy and make it more executable. It has also been used as a first logical step in developing a balanced scorecard framework.

So why do nonprofit organizations need Mission Driven Strategy? For some of the same reasons many forprofit organizations do. What is termed "strategic planning" is often not strategy at all. Many times my colleagues and I see broken strategic planning processes relegated to infrequent retreats that do not drive the organization toward its highest goal-its mission. In a number of nonprofit organizations, we see strategic plans that are not focused on the true mission of the organization, are focused on the wrong customers, or are overly attached to particular product and service offerings that have become or are rapidly becoming obsolete.