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Effective Organizations Achieve Superior Results

A few years ago, Bridgespan began surveying our clients' senior leadership teams about their organizations' strengths and weaknesses. We now have 30 nonprofits of varying sizes in our database, as well as a comparison set of data for more than 500 for-profits, which was developed at Bain & Company during their original research into decision-driven organizations. Analysis of these databases has provided quantitative evidence that effective organizations do indeed enable superior results. The highest performers do this by thinking about “organization” as much more than just the boxes and lines on the organization chart. Indeed, they think about organizational leadership, they identify the decisions that really matter, they develop the people necessary for success, they pay attention to work processes, and they create a high-performance culture.

This presentation summarizes findings, and discusses barriers that commonly prevent many nonprofits from building effective organizations. It also outlines approaches that nonprofits can use to increase the effectiveness of their organizations.

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