Total Quality Management for Philanthropy

When philanthropy and the nonprofit sector has been optimized, routinized, and made more effective and efficient, when we have legible and repeatable end to end solutions, when we measure what we manage and manage what we measure, when we prune back the idiosyncratic human elements, and eliminate the dead wood, the malcontents, the unions and the organizers who make nothing but trouble, is it fair to assume the following benefits?

• Managers, owners and investors will be better paid than currently, having straightened the rest of us out?
• Worker bees will work within plans that are carefully routinized around the proven and approved best practices, fad by management fad?
• Lower wages, benefit stripping, pension reductions, risk shifting, outsourcing, downsizing, right-sizing, sigma sixing, mandatory happiness training, and periodic purges will be necessary to insure a steady flow of dollars upward to the bosses, the social investors, the MBAs?

Having seen how this well-managed con works in education (No Child Left Behind and the immiseration of casual labor in academics), can you blame us who are worker bees for being skeptical about the social entrepreneurs and philanthrofatcats who approach us with the line, "We are MBAs. We are here to optimize you"? We know that what MBAs do essentially is what a parasite does, suck out the blood, and grow fat and lazy in the heat of another's labor.

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank my mentor, The Happy Tutor, Dungeon Master to the Stars, for his assistance with the tone and tenor of this post. He is helping me develop my Juvenalian side as part of my performance review and planning annual development program. I am being "optimized" on the fast track to a Dumpster of my own.

Disclaimer: By MBAs I do not mean my immediate superior, nor his boss, nor any of the bosses on up the line, to she who rules us all. Nor do I mean the Board of our Parent Organization, nor the many MBAs who contribute, or rather "invest" in Wealth Bond*ge, proud sponsor of Gifthub. Every rule has exceptions. Those who manage me are very fine people, as it happens, as is my owner.

Comments

[J. Erik Potter]

There you go - bashing MBAs again. . .Geez. TQM? That's so '70s thinking. I expected more from a follower of Diogenes. We're all about systems thinking now! Check out Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline. ; )

Sidenote, it wasn't that long ago leeches were praised for their medicinal properties.

[Phil Cubeta]

Mr. Potter, well put. Yes, a Leech was once another term for a Physician. So as a Moral Physician I am an Ethical Leech. As for Senge, he is terrific. His Fifth Discipline was recommended to me by H. Peter Karoff. Systems thinking is does not admit of input/output metrics, right? That is maybe the common ground on which we could all meet, that we need model or maps that are able to capture the living ecosystems and communities of giving, so that when we re-engineer we don't kill the thing we are trying to save.

Anyway, are you - gasp! - an actual MBA? If so, my apologies. I wish I was one. This is all sour grapes on my part.