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Honestly, this all sounds pretty typical of non-profit organizations. I've been working with various different ones since I was 7. Sometimes as a volunteer, som

Honestly, this all sounds pretty typical of non-profit organizations. I've been working with various different ones since I was 7. Sometimes as a volunteer, sometimes as an employee, sometimes as an executive, and sometimes as a board member. I have never seen a functional non-profit. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." And it's not just at the management levels. Volunteers and employees tend to have an irrational sense of entitlement, as though the mission of the group and the fact that they are in some way devoted to it earns them a right to a voice in the leadership. But there are also issues with the personalities that the management roles attract, particularly with boards. There are two types of board members: those who are doing the work because they think they should, so they want to get in, make decisions, and get out. Then there are the ones who are passionately invested in "the cause", and the passionate ones are complete wild cards. You never know what you are going to get. Narcissists, martyrs, and drama queens, most often. But sometimes other. I haven't been following this situation at all, but if I had to make a guess, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Lila was probably doing her honest and straightforward best to deal with a situation that was way over her head and made some mistakes. The board and other employees are probably a mixed bag of honest, good-heated people trying to make a difference, some complete nutbags, and a lot of people in between. In many ways, non-profits are like academia. Important and necessary organizations, but extremely disfunctional in the same ways. They tend to be sanctuaries for people who do not really function all that well in public society or companies. The pay stakes are generally lower, so people fight militantly over issues of status and control that seem trivial to the rest of the outside world.

kafkaesq 11y ago
I have never seen a functional non-profit. I've seen quite a few. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." Not sure how to put my finger on it, but your overall depiction does seem a bit, how to put this, "drama queen"-ish. As in, yes, we've all known of certain horror stories, meltdowns, etc, among non-profits. But overall your characterization (not specific to the sentence above) seems rather hyperbolic. People join non-profits with all kinds of motivations, just like they do for-profits. Yes, you do find narcissists -- but you also find a lot of solid, highly principled (and highly skilled) people. It's just that their stories usually aren't the ones that trigger open letters, blogposts, and interactive timeline visualizations.
- ianamartin 11y ago
  I'm calling it as I've seen it from my experience. I think I made that pretty clear. I'm not trying to make a general case that there is some specific quality of non-profits that makes it impossible for them to be functional. As I said pretty clearly above, the wikimedia story sounds typical, based on my interactions with non-profits.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Your experience, though, does not meet the reality that there are many fine non-profit success stories. There are a lot of non-functional ones, but I think all folks are pointing out is that it isn't as dire as you have seen.
    - ianamartin 11y ago
      Success is not the same as functional. One could argue that wikimedia has been very successful in its mission and it is at the same time also disfunctional. I wouldn't call any of the non-profits I've worked at failures. Hell, many people have described companies like Microsoft as badly disfunctional, but it would be hard to argue that they are not successful. If I stepped on anyone's toes with my post, I apologize. I was not trying to take a swipe at any one or any type of organization. I'm still involved with a number of organizations and admire and respect the work that they do.
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        No, I didn't mean to imply your experiences aren't valuable. I am the one who should apologise.
        RyanSingley 11y ago
        This kind of civil and thoughtful disagreement on the internet is rare, bravo.
      - Angostura 11y ago
flashman 11y ago
You're painting with a broad brush and your characterisation is greatly at odds with many of the functional non-profit organisations I know here in Australia: * the St Vincent de Paul Society * the National Heart Foundation * Cancer Council of Australia * Opera Australia * Unicef * National Disability Services I could go on. My point is, non-profit organisations encompass a huge spectrum of activity. Many operate like any other company and pay wages for the majority of employees. I would argue that 'the mission' actually makes a non-profit more likely to succeed, as everybody knows what they're working towards and what team they're on. Wikipedia is a different beast entirely.
- ars 11y ago
  I think he means non-profits where the board members don't get paid. Do the ones in your example list get paid?
- aaron695 11y ago
  You worked internally in of all these and more? Sorry if I'm a little doubtful but that's quite a resume.
  - jacalata 11y ago
    How do you define functional such that the only way to identify it is to work there?
    - aaron695 11y ago
      The Australian "National Heart Foundation" for instance has killed a lot of people, fucked up shit. But people love them cause they are functional. Lot's of PR. The op topic (On topic to the parent link) was they are very broken internally. So much so they fail the the cause of good. They do, and they don't, on topic is how good they are, is 500 million the red cross spent on 6 houses true, and right. What's the real story. Are NPO that bad really?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
wpietri 11y ago
My theory is that it's about the speed and strength of feedback loops. If you run your own restaurant and you're there every day serving food to customers, you have a very rich stream of immediate feedback on how your company is doing. The purpose is pretty clear. If you have a bad idea, people will tell you that your porkchop milkshake is terrible and you'll stop serving it. As companies grow, the feedback loops get longer and the signals get attenuated. That allows larger companies to get more and more crazy. Especially so for companies selling to the "enterprise" market. There deals happen very rarely, allowing the crazy to metastasize. Many non-profits have it worse, because they have broad missions. Their goal is to do good, but "good" often ends up being a broad category, so it's easy for them to end up doing a weird variety of things with varying degrees of effectiveness. Worse, even if you can get people to agree on a clear definition of "good", the feedback loops are weird. Since they rarely get money from direct service, they have to engage in a bunch of semi-related activities to fund the mission stuff. Often that's grant money, which means enterprise-like sales cycles and feedback loops that are way too long. The non-profits I've seen do best have clear missions, specific revenue sources, frequent feedback, and a lot of discipline around picking projects. E.g., I've volunteered for the Long Now Foundation for years; they're smart, small, and scrappy. Or the California Academy of Sciences runs a damned good science museum, and I think it really helps that each and every day things have to work for their thousands of visitors. But the further non-profits get away from that, I think the easier it is for madness to creep in.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  > Many non-profits have it worse, because they have broad missions. Their goal is to do good, but "good" often ends up being a broad category "Doing good" as a goal is not just broad, it is subjective. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Unless the goal is something practical, build something, maintain something, offer some kind of specific service, you are looking at a goal that is highly mobile and likely to be hijacked.
baldfat 11y ago
> I have never seen a functional non-profit Worked non-profits since 1988 and I have found the best place to work and have been with them for 8 years now. Very functional and a great place to work. We provide services for children throughout our area and have around 300 employees. If your actually interested in seeing a functional non-profit we can talk further.
wantreprenr007 11y ago
I've worked in startups and large ivy league universities... the latter has more focus on social capital than necessarily delivering value or customer service because there is less survival risk, so the emphasis is on social organizational capital (family-like, countryclub departments) than monetary profit (except for university profit-centers). I've also seen massive corruption, empire building, laughable leadership cognitive dissonance, waste, privacy disasters and embezzlement at one university which shall go nameless. It's true that the fights can be so brutal because the stakes are often so small. There are some exceptions where good leadership and teams exist and deliver worthy value without economic or social forces, but these are outliers.
- twobuy 11y ago
  That is really interesting to me, what sort of roles did you work in and what was your path? I'm getting into start-ups now as a coder, and while I went to Penn for undergrad, it was liberal arts. I'd love to loop back into academia if possible, and I'm wondering what sort of path you took? Thanks :)
- ianamartin 11y ago
  Both my parents are professors at a tier one university. My mom has been there for most of her adult life, going on 55+ years. My father has been a professor since just after he got back from WW2. Yes, he's that old. 96, and I'm in my mid 30s. Yay me. I have seen both of them have to deal with all kinds of insane bullshit. For the sake of the conversation, I must point out that my individual observations and experiences do not in any way constitute something I could call a general idea. My thoughts about non-profits and academia are limited to my own personal experiences. There are probably some great academic or non-profit places to work. Not disputing that. In fact, I'm working for a very healthy one right now in Brooklyn. But you know what the structure of that org is? Total artistic dictatorship.
hunvreus 11y ago
My experience has been somehow similar. What I think these organizations mostly lack is a clear incentive structure. Money flows in on one end and is spent on... stuff. There's not a strong incentive for tracking performance or impact. If you spent the money, got something out of it and didn't kill anybody in the process, you're gold. Actually, most non-profits I've worked with are very averse to the idea of measuring the impact of their activities. There's also the problem of failure; most just don't recognize failure as a necessary step to success. I regularly see complete failures being spun into successes. The very admission of failure is enough to get you fired or shunned. I'm actually looking at what comes out of YC (e.g. Watsi, Bayes Impact) to see if a new model of non-profits emerges, one that moves fast and embraces result-driven approaches.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
karlkatzke 11y ago
> I have never seen a functional non-profit. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." I interviewed there for a Systems Administrator position. Part of the interview was a code sample -- solve a specific problem using a scripting language. I submitted a 'mvp' -- a script that worked well, took about an hour of effort, and performed the required task in two environments, one of which was a chrooted jail that the person who graded it was welcome to log in to just in case the code did not work on their workstation. The feedback from the examiner relayed via the HR recruiter was that it was the "worst code they had ever seen," and they were offended that I did not write it in an object oriented manner and that it completely lacked any testing and validation -- which was wrong, actually, I validated inputs with a regular expression. Remember, this was for a systems administrator position, not a developer position. And after that feedback, I didn't want to work for Wikimedia anymore.

kafkaesq 11y ago

I have never seen a functional non-profit. I've seen quite a few. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." Not sure how to put my finger on it, but your overall depiction does seem a bit, how to put this, "drama queen"-ish. As in, yes, we've all known of certain horror stories, meltdowns, etc, among non-profits. But overall your characterization (not specific to the sentence above) seems rather hyperbolic. People join non-profits with all kinds of motivations, just like they do for-profits. Yes, you do find narcissists -- but you also find a lot of solid, highly principled (and highly skilled) people. It's just that their stories usually aren't the ones that trigger open letters, blogposts, and interactive timeline visualizations.

ianamartin 11y ago
I'm calling it as I've seen it from my experience. I think I made that pretty clear. I'm not trying to make a general case that there is some specific quality of non-profits that makes it impossible for them to be functional. As I said pretty clearly above, the wikimedia story sounds typical, based on my interactions with non-profits.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Your experience, though, does not meet the reality that there are many fine non-profit success stories. There are a lot of non-functional ones, but I think all folks are pointing out is that it isn't as dire as you have seen.
  - ianamartin 11y ago
    Success is not the same as functional. One could argue that wikimedia has been very successful in its mission and it is at the same time also disfunctional. I wouldn't call any of the non-profits I've worked at failures. Hell, many people have described companies like Microsoft as badly disfunctional, but it would be hard to argue that they are not successful. If I stepped on anyone's toes with my post, I apologize. I was not trying to take a swipe at any one or any type of organization. I'm still involved with a number of organizations and admire and respect the work that they do.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      No, I didn't mean to imply your experiences aren't valuable. I am the one who should apologise.
      - RyanSingley 11y ago
        This kind of civil and thoughtful disagreement on the internet is rare, bravo.
    - Angostura 11y ago

flashman 11y ago

You're painting with a broad brush and your characterisation is greatly at odds with many of the functional non-profit organisations I know here in Australia: * the St Vincent de Paul Society * the National Heart Foundation * Cancer Council of Australia * Opera Australia * Unicef * National Disability Services I could go on. My point is, non-profit organisations encompass a huge spectrum of activity. Many operate like any other company and pay wages for the majority of employees. I would argue that 'the mission' actually makes a non-profit more likely to succeed, as everybody knows what they're working towards and what team they're on. Wikipedia is a different beast entirely.

ars 11y ago
I think he means non-profits where the board members don't get paid. Do the ones in your example list get paid?
aaron695 11y ago
You worked internally in of all these and more? Sorry if I'm a little doubtful but that's quite a resume.
- jacalata 11y ago
  How do you define functional such that the only way to identify it is to work there?
  - aaron695 11y ago
    The Australian "National Heart Foundation" for instance has killed a lot of people, fucked up shit. But people love them cause they are functional. Lot's of PR. The op topic (On topic to the parent link) was they are very broken internally. So much so they fail the the cause of good. They do, and they don't, on topic is how good they are, is 500 million the red cross spent on 6 houses true, and right. What's the real story. Are NPO that bad really?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

wpietri 11y ago

My theory is that it's about the speed and strength of feedback loops. If you run your own restaurant and you're there every day serving food to customers, you have a very rich stream of immediate feedback on how your company is doing. The purpose is pretty clear. If you have a bad idea, people will tell you that your porkchop milkshake is terrible and you'll stop serving it. As companies grow, the feedback loops get longer and the signals get attenuated. That allows larger companies to get more and more crazy. Especially so for companies selling to the "enterprise" market. There deals happen very rarely, allowing the crazy to metastasize. Many non-profits have it worse, because they have broad missions. Their goal is to do good, but "good" often ends up being a broad category, so it's easy for them to end up doing a weird variety of things with varying degrees of effectiveness. Worse, even if you can get people to agree on a clear definition of "good", the feedback loops are weird. Since they rarely get money from direct service, they have to engage in a bunch of semi-related activities to fund the mission stuff. Often that's grant money, which means enterprise-like sales cycles and feedback loops that are way too long. The non-profits I've seen do best have clear missions, specific revenue sources, frequent feedback, and a lot of discipline around picking projects. E.g., I've volunteered for the Long Now Foundation for years; they're smart, small, and scrappy. Or the California Academy of Sciences runs a damned good science museum, and I think it really helps that each and every day things have to work for their thousands of visitors. But the further non-profits get away from that, I think the easier it is for madness to creep in.

digi_owl 11y ago
> Many non-profits have it worse, because they have broad missions. Their goal is to do good, but "good" often ends up being a broad category "Doing good" as a goal is not just broad, it is subjective. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Unless the goal is something practical, build something, maintain something, offer some kind of specific service, you are looking at a goal that is highly mobile and likely to be hijacked.

baldfat 11y ago

> I have never seen a functional non-profit Worked non-profits since 1988 and I have found the best place to work and have been with them for 8 years now. Very functional and a great place to work. We provide services for children throughout our area and have around 300 employees. If your actually interested in seeing a functional non-profit we can talk further.

wantreprenr007 11y ago

I've worked in startups and large ivy league universities... the latter has more focus on social capital than necessarily delivering value or customer service because there is less survival risk, so the emphasis is on social organizational capital (family-like, countryclub departments) than monetary profit (except for university profit-centers). I've also seen massive corruption, empire building, laughable leadership cognitive dissonance, waste, privacy disasters and embezzlement at one university which shall go nameless. It's true that the fights can be so brutal because the stakes are often so small. There are some exceptions where good leadership and teams exist and deliver worthy value without economic or social forces, but these are outliers.

twobuy 11y ago
That is really interesting to me, what sort of roles did you work in and what was your path? I'm getting into start-ups now as a coder, and while I went to Penn for undergrad, it was liberal arts. I'd love to loop back into academia if possible, and I'm wondering what sort of path you took? Thanks :)
ianamartin 11y ago
Both my parents are professors at a tier one university. My mom has been there for most of her adult life, going on 55+ years. My father has been a professor since just after he got back from WW2. Yes, he's that old. 96, and I'm in my mid 30s. Yay me. I have seen both of them have to deal with all kinds of insane bullshit. For the sake of the conversation, I must point out that my individual observations and experiences do not in any way constitute something I could call a general idea. My thoughts about non-profits and academia are limited to my own personal experiences. There are probably some great academic or non-profit places to work. Not disputing that. In fact, I'm working for a very healthy one right now in Brooklyn. But you know what the structure of that org is? Total artistic dictatorship.

hunvreus 11y ago

My experience has been somehow similar. What I think these organizations mostly lack is a clear incentive structure. Money flows in on one end and is spent on... stuff. There's not a strong incentive for tracking performance or impact. If you spent the money, got something out of it and didn't kill anybody in the process, you're gold. Actually, most non-profits I've worked with are very averse to the idea of measuring the impact of their activities. There's also the problem of failure; most just don't recognize failure as a necessary step to success. I regularly see complete failures being spun into successes. The very admission of failure is enough to get you fired or shunned. I'm actually looking at what comes out of YC (e.g. Watsi, Bayes Impact) to see if a new model of non-profits emerges, one that moves fast and embraces result-driven approaches.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

karlkatzke 11y ago

> I have never seen a functional non-profit. For whatever reason, non-profits seem to attract all kinds of people who are motivated by things I can only describe as "weird." I interviewed there for a Systems Administrator position. Part of the interview was a code sample -- solve a specific problem using a scripting language. I submitted a 'mvp' -- a script that worked well, took about an hour of effort, and performed the required task in two environments, one of which was a chrooted jail that the person who graded it was welcome to log in to just in case the code did not work on their workstation. The feedback from the examiner relayed via the HR recruiter was that it was the "worst code they had ever seen," and they were offended that I did not write it in an object oriented manner and that it completely lacked any testing and validation -- which was wrong, actually, I validated inputs with a regular expression. Remember, this was for a systems administrator position, not a developer position. And after that feedback, I didn't want to work for Wikimedia anymore.