The Wall Street Journal weekend edition last weekend covered Eli Broad and his philanthropy. If you don't know, Mr. Broad is retired from for-profit jobs where he founded two Fortune 500 companies. He lives in Los Angeles and manages a foundation with $2.1 billion. As Ms. Riley, from the WSJ points, out, he is living by the Carnegie mantra of "Who dies with wealth, dies in shame."

On Tuesday of this week, I facilitated a 2.5 hour session called measuring and managing your strategy. I had a choice. I could teach to a case, and get participants from 30 organizations to all work on the same material, or I could ask them to build their own strategy map and measures. Now the challenge is that to effectively build a strategy map and measures typically takes 2-3 sessions of working with an organization's leadership team. Oh, did I mention that I also wanted to teach about using the Balanced Scorecard as a management tool, not just a measurement tool.

I read an interesting article in the Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge website. It is essentially a book review of esteemed professor Michael Beer. His new book is called High Commitment High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage. The book explores long-term successes like Southwest Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Toyota, etc. It got me wondering about nonprofits leveraging these same skills.

Yesterday, InsideNGO kicked off their week-long annual meeting in Washington, DC. The first few days focus on Finance, Grants, Contracts, and Personal/Professional Development. The next few days focuses on Human Resources. Ascendant and one of our clients, Rare, gave a presentation yesterday afternoon.

I get a regular email from HBS Working Knowledge, and today's email had a very interesting article in it. The article was called Trusth in Giving: Experimental Evidence on the Welfare Effects of Informed Giving to the Poor. Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee is doing research with Christina Fong to study whether people give more when they understand the plight of the person they are giving to. They try to answer the questions about how giving changes based on the context of the group being helped. Would you give more or less money to individuals who are poor because of circumstances they control (gambling or drug problems) or circumstances out of their control (children or economically devistated region). His research is interesting.

At a panel discussion at Harvard Business School Global Business Summit the topic was how to address the national crisis in public education. The all star list of speakers endorsed different approaches and yet agree on the fundamentals of how to transform the education system through disruptive education.

On June 18, the New York Times in coordination with the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York and Philanthropy New York (the old Regional Association of Grantmakers). Like last year, this event was held in the wonderful NY Times center, and the presentations were excellent.

I had the pleasure of being at the best practices workshop and the awards ceremony at the Washington Post today. This was the 15 year anniversary of the award for excellence in nonprofit management. The Center for Nonprofit Management manages the award program. This year, there were some great finalists.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the stimulus plan had $100 billion in it for school systems, with only one catch to the money. You had to demonstrate that you were making progress in improving the performance of students. This is money on top of all of the foundation money that is available to the same schools with the same challenge. "Show me you are making a difference."

School of Management Students taking the Strategic Performance Measures spent three hours role playing as Board of Trustees developing a Strategy Map for the School of Management. Their two classes on the Balanced Scorecard equipped them for the task. The output was a draft strategy map for the Simmons School of Management, the oldest all-women's business school in the country.