Last week, I listened to the Presidential Address of Boston University President, Melissa Gilliam, and her “North Star vision” for the university I have been teaching at for the last 18+ years. Her main thrust was about “convergent research,” a concept based on blurring boundaries between campuses and fields of study.
I launched this newsletter in the summer of 2020. It was a time of great uncertainty (I’m sure you remember why). Well, here we are, five-and-a-half years later, and once again, significant uncertainty is with us.
Winter is nearly here. As we do every year at this time, my wife and I cleaned up the front lawn to prepare for spring…
This fall, one of my new responsibilities is to occasionally pick up our twin granddaughters from nursery school. They wrap up midday and their parents don’t have the same work flexibility as I do.
Traditionally, business organizations tended to be divided into two, nonoverlapping segments: for-profit or nonprofit. If you had a social mission — charitable, educational etc. — you organized as a nonprofit. If you had a commercial purpose, you formed a for-profit company. Funding approaches for each were likewise separate and distinct.
Five years ago this summer, we were in the early days of the pandemic. It was a time of intense uncertainty. Many businesses effectively “froze,” either doing nothing or reacting to events as they happened.
Click to listen Back in the 90s, I led the strategy and marketing department for a major regional discount department store chain. Our primary advertising approach was to mass-distribute “circulars” (mini-magazine-like ads) in the Sunday newspaper. At the time, these reached nearly everyone in our market area. We knew we were “wasting money” on the people…
While plans themselves may be of diminished importance as time passes and situations evolve, the exercise of creating a plan is truly worthwhile — it’s where the real value lives.
It’s no secret that today’s economic climate, where decisions from the federal government are made, then adjusted, then reversed, and then sometimes reinstated, has led to a great deal of uncertainty among nonprofits and businesses alike.
As I write this, we are 100 days into the new presidential administration. Needless to say, it’s been a time of chaos and great uncertainty, characterized by sweeping actions and dramatic changes across many sectors.