Managing the Dream

Head Table Guests

Laurie Ludwick, Director of Media Relations, Trizec Corporation; Larry Grossman, Q.C., former Ontario Treasurer and Minster of Health and currently Partner, Blaney, McMurtry, Stapells, Friedman; The Rev. Margaret Tandy, Assistant Curate, St. Timothy's Church, Agincourt; David Crombie, former Mayor and Federal Cabinet Minister and Commissioner, Waterfront Regeneration Trust; Marjorie Sharpe, President and CEO, The Community Foundation of Toronto; Fraser Fell, Chairman, Gentra Inc.; John Cassaday, 1995 United Way of Greater Toronto Campaign Chair and President and CEO, CTV; Her Worship Barbara Hall, Mayor, City of Toronto; David Beatty, Chairman and CEO, Peter F. Drucker Canadian Foundation; Rahat Pye, student, York University; Courtney Pratt, President, Noranda Inc.; John Fisher, former President, Southam Communications and Chair, The Council for Business and the Arts in Canada; Monica Patten, Executive Director, The Community Foundations of Canada; Harri Jansson, Executive Vice-President, Central Ontario Bank of Montreal; Susan Pigott, Acting President, The United Way of Greater Toronto; and Bill Wilkerson, President and CEO, Liberty International Canada.

Introduction by David Edmison

We have a head table of very distinguished people. It is my pleasure to welcome one of those distinguished individuals now, Her Worship, the Mayor of Toronto, Barbara Hall. It is very fitting that Her Worship be here today because she has had a long history as a community leader and activist. She has worked effectively with a number of diverse groups, bringing people together to solve problems and build more livable communities.

First elected in 1985 as City Councillor for Ward 7, she has been returned for two successive terms, the last carrying 71 per cent of the vote. Her Worship has worked with the community to introduce several innovative initiatives to our city, such as the Safe City Committee and the Don River Task Force. She has held a number of key positions while on City Council, including Chair of the Neighbourhoods Committee; Chair of the Alternative Housing SubCommittee; Director, the Toronto Arts Council, to name just a few. In support of the initiatives of the Drucker Award Foundation, Her Worship has declared that today, October 26, would be "Non-Profit Innovation Day" in Toronto, a testament to her long-standing support of the non-profit sector.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, our mayor, Her Worship, Barbara Hall.

Her Worship, Barbara Hall

Thank you Mr. President. Honoured head table guests, friends and a special welcome to a municipal colleague from Vancouver, City Councillor, Sam Sullivan.

It's a real pleasure to be here today to share with you Non-Profit Innovation Day and to welcome the Peter F. Drucker Awards to the City of Toronto. They have arrived just at the right moment. It would always have been important to have these awards to bring together The Empire Club, members of the non-profit service delivery sector of this city and the corporate community to focus on innovation, but right now it's even more important. We're going through phenomenal change. At the City we're facing change in municipal government; change in how City Hall works; change in our relationship with the government; change on every level. We know we need to have change, but if we are going to have that change hap-

pen in a way that keeps this a city which is good to live in, we are going to have to develop partnerships and work together like we never have before. We are going to have to bring every ounce of creativity and resourcefulness that any of us have to do things differently.

These awards focus on innovation and the Canadian non-profit community and come at a very crucial time. I'm delighted that two of the finalists for this award come from Toronto. Thank you very much for coming to Toronto. Thank you for focussing on something we all know is essential and it is a real pleasure for me as mayor of the City of Toronto to proclaim today Non-Profit Innovation Day.

Thank you very much.

Introduction by David Edmison

This afternoon, we are here to celebrate and salute the people in the non-profit sector who have made a difference; individuals, who by striving for excellence have made a valued contribution to society and our collective quality of life.

Quite often, new initiatives in our community are borne out of our search for solutions to real problems and challenges. It is through the generous donations of time, expertise and money by individuals and corporations that services are provided and sustained. People are the most valuable resource in the non-profit sector. Sir Winston Churchill said, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."

Today, our community agencies and services are coping with increasing demands for their services and declining revenues from the public sector. It means managers must be increasingly innovative to meet these challenges. They must adopt many of the systems and management models used in the "for-profit" sector.

One organisation which is playing a leading role in ensuring the health and vitality of the non-profit sector is the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for non-profit management.

Peter Drucker said: "Every achievement of management is the achievement of a manager. Every failure is the failure of a manager. People manage, rather than `forces' or `facts.' The vision, dedication, and integrity of managers determines whether there is management or mis- management."

The Foundation which he founded serves as a catalyst that leads the social sector toward achieving excellence in performance while building responsible citizenship. It provides programmes and resources for making non-profit agencies more effective, making innovation a central part of the strategy. With us today, as our special guest, is the Founding President of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation, Mrs. Frances Hesselbein.

In addition to her role with the Drucker Foundation Mrs. Hesselbein is Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Josephson Institute for the Advancement of Ethics. From 1976 to 1990, she was President and CEO of the Girl Scouts of America. Our guest was appointed by U.S. President George Bush to the Board of Directors of the Commission on National and Community Service in August 1991 and to his Advisory Committee on The Points of Light Initiative Foundation in 1989.

Mrs. Hesselbein has been recognised in the academic world and has nine honorary doctoral degrees. She has given the commencement speech at dozens of prestigious universities and colleges throughout the United States. In 1994, she addressed the government's National Performance Review Team and opened the Chief Executive's Agenda Series at the University of Minnesota. She is a frequent visitor to the Harvard Business School, which has published a case study of her work with the Girl Scouts of America. Mrs. Hesselbein is recognised around the world and has chaired the prestigious Salzburg Seminar on Managing Non-Government Organizations for leaders from Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Our guest has been featured on the cover of "Business Week," appears in the management videotape "The Leader Within" and has moderated a number of management audio tape programmes sponsored by the Drucker Foundation. Mrs. Hesselbein was appointed a member of the Kellogg Foundation National Task Force on African-American Men and Boys in 1994, and to the Nonprofit Policy & Leadership Advisory Board of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In 1995, she was the first woman to be inducted into the Johnstown, Pennsylvania Business Hall of Fame.

Our guest is a member of 16 different boards, including the Mutual of America Life Insurance Company. She has over a dozen book and magazine citations to her credit, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Professional Leadership Award, presented by the United Way of America.

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to warmly welcome a truly remarkable and energetic leader in and, indeed beyond, the non-

profit sector; a person described recently as the "the outstanding manager of our age," Mrs. Frances Hesselbein.

Frances Hesselbein

Thank you very much President David.

Your Worship and all you wonderful friends of the Canadian Drucker Foundation, this is such an honour to be here. I bring you Peter Drucker's greetings and his warm appreciation for the remarkable contributions you all are making to the society. It is a wonderful moment when I can be in a city that is celebrating Non-Profit Innovation Day. I am taking a number of proclamations back with me and wherever I go I am going to say, "If Toronto can do it, why can't we?"

It is wonderful as well to be here for the third Canadian Drucker Award for innovation and to have two award winners present, both incredibly gifted leaders who help define leadership in Canada and far beyond our borders.

These are very uneasy days for over one million nonprofit voluntary organisations in the social sector. Peter Drucker uses "social sector" instead of "non profit" because he says "non profit" describes what you are not. He says the social-sector organisations are the future of America and if he were here he would say North America.

They lead the way in education, health care, youth and family services, conservation, the arts and religion. In fact, he says it is the social sector that may yet save the society-a very sober but hopeful observation.

My premise is that the social-sector organisations, the stewards of public money and public trust, will have to be well led and well managed. The common challenge affects all three sectors-private, public and voluntary.

The editor of the magazine "Chief Executive," which goes to 40,000 leading corporate chief executives around the world, asked a group of CEOs worldwide to "size up the future." I'd like to share a few lines from the editor's comment on the article, "Beyond the millennium." He

said: "What are the major challenges affecting business leaders beyond the millennium?" For its one hundredth issue "Chief Executive" asked a number of leading CEOs from different industries around the world to look over the horizon and tell us about their greatest long-term tasks, because the future is crashing into the present with frightening speed.

I was surprised to be one of those invited to write my views of the most pressing tasks ahead for tomorrow's leaders because I do not head a giant multi-billion-dollar corporation. I responded and presented just three critical challenges I believe leaders in all three sectors will face beyond the millennium. In February the issue was published with photographs of 19 leaders and their views. Eighteen were men who do head giant corporations including Coca Cola, BMW and Intel and I was the nineteenth. Now if I had been asked to write the three most pressing tasks for the Bank of Montreal, the Toronto United Way or the Canadian Red Cross, my response would have been identical because I believe they are common to all of us in all three sectors. I chose to present three in nine sentences and I would like to share them with you.

The three major challenges CEOs will face have little to do with managing the enterprise's tangible assets and everything to do with monitoring the quality of leadership, the work force and relationships. The first challenge requires understanding that leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do it-communicating vision, unleashing the power of disbursed leadership and embodying the organisation's values. This will be basic and indispensable in a tenuous future.

The second challenge is building a competitive work force for the future. This requires banning a hierarchy that limits and constricts and skillfully leading a diverse work force and then building a productive workplace

where teams and individuals can maintain and attain high performance.

The third challenge blurs all boundaries-forming partnerships that will restore the cohesive communityand this transcends the corporation and if unmet will diminish it. Government alone cannot meet burgeoning social needs and this is true all over the world. The corporation cannot take on the responsibilities the government is relinquishing. The voluntary social sector alone does not have the resources to meet the needs of children and families and communities. CEOs must therefore give leadership to the new partnerships with public, private and social sector leaders working together as equal partners, not as donors and recipients, to build the cohesive community.

After the magazine came out a corporate leader wrote to me and said, "Your comments in `Chief Executive' `Beyond the millennium' make great sense to me. I believe the three challenges you described are three legs on a stool, yet I see leaders attending to just one or perhaps two of the legs. The challenge to all of us is to be very sure that the voluntary-sector stool has three sturdy legs."

These are the stormiest seas I have seen in my career as CEO for 25 years. Life is incredibly more difficult for children, for families, for workers who want to work and have no jobs or can't make enough to live on, for young people deprived of adequate education and training and for our communities that have lost their cohesion and hope. The backdrop for this meeting, as Drucker tells us, is the most massive change in over 200 years. It is global change. Unlearning yesterday's lesson and learning tomorrow's will be a great challenge for all voluntary agencies and their funders. Each organisation in every sector needs to challenge the gospel of what is working today but will have little relevance in tomorrow's tenuous

environment. Board and staff have to challenge every policy and practice and procedure assumption.

We ask our governing boards and management: "Have we dared to unleash the power of disbursed leadership moving shared decision making to the very outer edges of a circle and have we made our recipients full partners, not focussing on providing energy but releasing energy?"

New partnerships are key to success. In late May I flew to Milwaukee to join General Electric's leadership development trainers from New York where together with the Drucker Foundation they presented a day-long conference to all the non-profit voluntary community organisations and the United Way. Now in the morning the GE trainers presented change-management tools that worked for GE and in the afternoon I presented the challenge of accountability using the Drucker self-assessment tool you have out on the table. There we had the example of a partnership of a giant well-managed corporation collaborating with a very small Drucker Foundation and the United Way and all the Milwaukee community agencies in a conference that helped those who serve be more productive, provide better service, and strengthen the whole community. GE said if it works we'll do it three or four more times. It worked. We have already done three with several ahead.

One reality that we are faced with is that donors no longer reward good intentions; they reward results. When the Drucker Foundation published the self-assessment tool, it was to help organisations that say, "You tell us we have to achieve excellence but how do we know when we get there?" It is very clear that in 1995 we measure what we value and we value what we measure when we manage for results.

Last June I arrived in Buenos Aries to conduct Argentina's first-ever conference on managing non-profit organisations. Argentina is working to build a third sector in this rapidly changing civil society. After 50 years of

social disintegration the government declared that our seminars were of national interest and we presented three days of seminars on leadership and management. Our team of five did this; three from Drucker, two from Andersen Consulting and the response was overwhelming. On the last morning, instead of 250 registered participants for our day on moving from good intentions to great results, 850 men and women arrived in the Pacific Auditorium. It filled with energy that fairly crackled around the room and a woman came up to me and said: "I have driven 1700 kilometres to be here." Now they are determined to build a third sector. They are determined to change lives and strengthen a nation with absolutely no tradition of individual and corporate giving. They are determined that they are going to build this healthy voluntary sector that is so indispensable to a healthy society. I came back moved, inspired. I go back again in May.

To sum up the challenge to non-profit is to scrap the turf and the lone ranger approach and then with our vision and missions and all of our systems and policies and procedures in place we take the lead as we look for partners-these new alliances that will multiply and impact on results. All along the way we communicate over and over what we do, why we do it, how we do it and with whom. We see our donors as valued partners and we see those we serve equally as our valued partners. They all become our partners in communicating results, communicating with all of our customers, all of our public in every way that human beings communicate. It is called daily hard work. We say to the leaders of this voluntary sector, "Take the lead, ask the few critical questions, define the new realities, build these alliances that will multiply and welcome." It is a visible, difficult, demanding and exhilarating role, leading a nation to a new era of compassion, inclusiveness, cohesion and appreciation. Those who travel with us as equal partners will be those we

serve, those we serve with and those who share this vision of healthy children, strong families, good schools, decent neighbourhoods and work that dignifies, all embraced by the cohesive community. It is called managing the dream and this is what we honour today in Toronto.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by John Cassaday, 1995 United Way of Greater Toronto Campaign Chair and President and CEO, CTV and David Beatty, Chairman and CEO, Peter F. Drucker Canadian Foundation.