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February 2001, Volume 69, Number 2 |
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February 2001, Volume 69, Number 2 |
Students'Outsiders' Add
Breadth to
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| Photograph by Robert Holmgren |
IN A PROGRAM THAT BOASTS OF ITS DIVERSITY, two of this year's Sloan fellows are stretching the limits. Jacqueline Muka of Nairobi and Timothy Werner of Washington, D.C., both have spent their entire careers with nonprofits. Their presence among their mainly corporate and government classmates is due to a grant, the first of its kind to the Sloan Program, from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Muka and Werner are nearly as different from one another as they are from their classmates. Muka is an African with an academic background in accounting. She is head of finance and administration for the Centre for African Family Studies (CAFS), a nongovernmental organization that serves all of sub-Saharan Africa in the area of reproductive health education. As chief financial officer, Muka is part of a team of three attempting to set up an endowment for the foundation.
Werner is an American, a zoologist who is the Washington, D.C.-based director of the marine biodiversity program within the new Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International, an environmental organization with global outreach. Werner has spent much of his career in the field, particularly in the South Pacific, most commonly where coral reefs are found.
Both CAFS and Conservation International are grantees of the Packard Foundation, which is how Muka and Werner came to the attention of the Sloan Program in the first place and were invited to compete for the two fellowships.
The idea of a Packard-financed Sloan fellowship came up when Kirk Hanson, Sloan Program director, and Barbara Kibbe, the foundation's director of organizational effectiveness, were brainstorming how Packard and Stanford might collaborate to promote better management and leadership education for nonprofit managers at the executive level.
"A primary objective of the Packard Foundation is to enhance the quality of nonprofit management," Hanson says. "While it is dedicated to improving the organizational effectiveness of its grantees, it is also concerned with increasing the effectiveness of the nonprofit sector in general."
In the course of the conversation, Hanson mentioned that it is difficult to recruit Sloan participants from nonprofit organizations because of the cost of the program. If it were possible to fund them, Kibbe asked, would Hanson truly be willing to give up one or two of the program's 48 Sloan spots to people from nonprofits?
Hanson gave an unqualified yes. "I felt it would help the program because it would help in the education of the other 46," says Hanson. "I believe that strongly. I think their presence will improve the educational experience of the others, because it provides greater diversity and gives the for-profit managers a chance to look at a different world of management and leadership than most of them know."
What the foundation finally worked out was that Packard would pay all costs associated with the program: tuition, fees covering everything including field trips, local expenses, some portion of the fellow's salary, and moving costs. "It's the same level of support as most corporations provide," Hanson says.
Muka and Werner are not the first public-sector managers to become Sloans. The program actually has a long history of government-sponsored fellows. Nor are they even the only nonprofit managers in the program this year. Two of their classmates, Lana Guernsey and Irena Komitova, also represent nonprofit organizations: Guernsey is the director of development for the Girls' Middle School in Mountain View, Calif., and Komitova, after setting up the Bulgarian sales branch of the Swedish cosmetics company Oriflame and turning it into a $10 million business, recently became project manager for the company's nonprofit foundation in Sofia.
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"Here they're thinking about their $20 billion budgets, and I'm looking at my $3 million budget I can't even balance!" |
But while Guernsey and Komitova have extensive prior experience in the private sector, Muka and Werner are unusual in that they have spent their entire careers in nonprofits. They are people for whom, only a year ago, taking a year of professional management education at Stanford Business School seemed as unlikely a prospect as seeing their organizations go up on the New York Stock Exchange. Yet they and Werner's wife and preschool-age daughters and Muka's nanny and first-grader son have been on campus since September, all of them stretching their boundaries even as they enrich the people with whom they come in contact.
The interaction with other Sloans is important to Muka, she says. The other fellows may come from far different backgrounds, but their ideas inhabit common ground. She laughs. "Here they are thinking about their $20 billion budgets, and I'm looking at my $3 million budget I can't even balance! I guess they have different concerns, but it's interesting to see the way we approach different things in different ways, and yet we can relate."
Relating is important to Muka's organization as well. The small, 36-member CAFS is educational in its outreach. "We mainly provide training, hoping that at the end there will be a responsible exercise of reproductive rights," she says. To achieve this, CAFS has taken the lead in promoting partnerships within the public sector. In 1999, it hosted a conference of nongovernmental organizations from 24 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and six outside of the area, all concerned with reproductive health issues such as family planning and stopping the spread of AIDS. The conference resulted in the Nairobi Declaration, which confirmed the NGO partnership strategy in the sub-Sahara.
With roughly 600 employees and a presence on six continents, Conservation International already has outreach, but it too is constantly seeking partners among governments, NGOs, and corporations. Relatively new to the home office in Washington, Werner hopes the Sloan Program will help him in his future dealings with corporate leaders. And it's a plus if the other Sloan fellows see him as something other than a "wild-haired tree-hugger" in their midst, he allows with a chuckle.
Additionally, Werner says, "Environmental organizations often have the brightest, most committed people from a diverse array of disciplines-biology, economics, geographical information systems, anthropology, sociology, law. But I would say, in comparison to the business world, they have a lot less strength in management. The major contribution this program can make to me is to strengthen that skill."
Stanford Business School has been a leader in nonprofit management education at the MBA level since the early 1970s. Now it is beginning to turn to working managers. Thanks to the Packard Foundation, the Sloan Program will receive four additional grants over the next three years for nonprofit managers. And more attention to nonprofit executives is on the way. Not long after Werner and Muka started Sloan classes last fall, the School hosted a pilot executive program for nonprofits, and the School has created a new Center for Social Innovation to promote research and interaction between academics and leaders in social innovation activities.
It all makes sense to the two Packard-funded Sloans. Explains Muka, ever the practical number cruncher: "Look at it this way: At the end of the day, whether you are a nonprofit or a for-profit, you must be at least able to make enough money to pay the bills."
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