Page 244 - The Drucker Lectures

Managing the Nonprofit Organization [ 225

tion than to ask, “What is our mission?” And that is the reason
why so many nonprofits are reluctant to ask it. And that is the
reason why you must ask it. Nothing is more dangerous than
the fear of dissent. No effective decision can be reached unless
there is dissent, for the simple reason that an effective decision is
a high-risk decision. And unless you have effective dissent, you
don’t understand what you are deciding, what is really at stake.
Take the Pomona Council of Churches. Anybody connected
with it? I am, but only through my wife, so it’s a very loose con-
nection. Now, we have 60, maybe 100, churches in this area.
And it’s not a bad idea for the clergy to get together and discuss
common problems. And it’s perhaps also a good idea to hash
out major disagreements beforehand, before you go public with
them, so that you don’t make too much of an ass of yourself in
public. It’s a good idea. And that leads logically to the step where
we say, “We’re getting along so well, let’s have a permanent orga-
nization and do something together.” Fine. I suspect that’s how
this particular council came into being. But they had no idea—
and still don’t—what to do. You know the old saying that if you
lay all economists end to end, you would still have no conclusion.
Clergymen are no different. Most of the human race is like that.
So you have to be willing to say that we have no purpose. There
is no law that says that the Pomona Council of Churches has to
exist. It was not created by the Good Lord; it’s a human inven-
tion. And not all of them make sense.
Let me give you an example of what not to do. The most suc-
cessful nonprofit effort—and I mean that without any qualifica-
tion—was the infantile paralysis, the polio, campaign. It had no
precedent. Franklin Roosevelt, as all of you know, was stricken
with polio in 1922 and almost died. He never recovered. And his
law partner [Basil O’Connor] started a foundation to fight polio
[the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the predeces-
sor organization to the March of Dimes]. He was a lawyer and