Perspective

Is Kiwanis too good to be great?

In his best-selling business book Good to Great, Jim Collins makes the case that the real enemy of greatness is not evil or bad. His thesis is that the primary competitor to great is actually good, and that most organizations never end up achieving greatness because they settle for being good enough. This is especially true for service organizations that are full of good people, with good intentions, doing good things. 

"At Kiwanis, we are striving to build on a foundation of 91 years of good in an effort to become a truly great organization."

Rob Parker Kiwanis International CEO/Executive Director

At Kiwanis, we are striving to build on a foundation of 91 years of good in an effort to become a truly great organization. According to some fairly exhaustive research on this topic, this is a much more difficult task than it might appear. The leap from good to great is one that is made by a very small percentage of businesses, and even fewer nonprofit organizations.

For many business people who get involved with Kiwanis, the natural inclination is to adapt or apply business principles to improve the results and effectiveness of Kiwanis. The words they use to articulate this thought is some version of the following: “If we just ran this thing more like a business, we would get the kind of results we are looking for.”

I must admit this sounds very reasonable, and for years I have worked to run my nonprofit organizations more like a business. For a peek into why this kind of thinking may have headed many of us down the wrong path, consider the following excerpt from Good to Great for the Social Sectors.

“We must reject the idea—well intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business.’ Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?

“The critical distinction is not between business and social, but between great and good. We need to reject the naïve imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors, and instead jointly embrace a language of greatness.”

Over the coming months you will hear the leaders of Kiwanis articulating the principles of greatness that we are beginning to embrace as an organization. There are too many children in this world who are counting on us to be great. Good is no longer good enough. Expectations must be raised at all levels so that we can truly become a great organization. On behalf of the more than 2 billion children on this planet, I hope you will join this journey to greatness.