Q: What is Applied Wisdom for the Nonprofit Sector?
Jim: Applied Wisdom for the Nonprofit Sector is an effort to help improve the management and the operational excellence of nonprofits. From my work in nonprofits we see that there really hasn’t been much practical management material available. And so this is a summary
effort to help with that.

Q: How can nonprofits benefit?
Jim: I’ve found the management tips I’ve developed have helped build a strong culture with effective implementation in the organizations that I’ve been involved with over the years.

Q: Is there a story behind how you developed your leadership insights?
Jim: I grew up in a small town in the Midwest. We had a family farm and cannery. It gave me some opportunities to get some experience when I was very young. For example, I managed a small crew in the warehouse when I was about 15. Things went on from there. I went to college, and then in the Reserve Officers Training summer camp at Fort Bragg, with the 82nd Airborne, I was given a little wallet-size card that had the principles and traits of leadership. And since then I began to put away ideas that I’d run across, or get from people, or articles over the years, and eventually I realized that a lot of the experience I’d had in the cannery and growing up was applicable to good management tips. I’ve kept those and in my thirties I realized that my purpose in life was to help other people individually, and as organizations, to meet their potential. I had other ideas from management that I gained at Textron, from my years in venture capital, and of course the almost three decades I spent as CEO at Applied Materials, here in Silicon Valley. And then various nonprofit efforts have also contributed ideas that I’ve included here.

Q: Where did the tips come from?
Jim: When I was working on my autobiography I actually identified over a hundred tips. I didn’t even realize there that many at the beginning. But those have been valuable and I picked out a few of the key ones to use in this booklet, Applied Wisdom for the Nonprofit Sector.

Q: What value do you hope nonprofits will gain?
Jim: Well, I hope the nonprofits will learn from the material in the booklet and the website applied wisdom for nonprofits, about how to improve their management and their organizational strength.

Q: What should people do after they read Applied Wisdom for the Nonprofit Sector?
Jim: One of the things I hope is, and I think it would be really helpful to each person that has exposed to these ideas, is to develop their own list of tips over the decades ahead and incorporate the ones that seem to work into their management culture and management style, and just really take advantage of what they’ll pick up.
There’s a lot of good ideas out there and sometimes the old ideas come back, that all of a sudden can fit into a new situation. So it’s both great for new ideas and for the application of old ideas.

Q: Do you have any other suggestions?
Jim: We’ve recently taken some of these tips and incorporated them into a very short email each week, an idea that’s current, related to the current times. And I hope people will follow those and pick the ones that might work for them and think about how they can improve their organization. Just a little tickler to get you to think about it each week or so.

To your success!

Irene: Hi, my name is Irene Chavez, Senior Vice-President and Area Manager with Kaiser Permanente. And I’m here with Jim Morgan and we are going to be talking about principles related to his wonderful book called Applied Wisdom. And what a wonderful, wonderful title, because it is jam-packed with wisdom.

So my first question is how did you empower your employees to contribute to the organization with the use of questions?

Jim: One of the things that I found that helps is you need to think about culture, planning and implementation. That’s what Applied Wisdom for Nonprofits, what the sections are. And to have the right people to be able to make decisions and go forward, it helps to have a accepting culture. So we used to say that good news is no news, no news is bad news and bad news is good news, if you do something about it.

So there was a pretty free flow of information from all levels of the company. And that was important also because there were so many cultures. In fact, this is back in the eighties, there were a few people who were executives during those times and I saw them a couple months ago, and they asked, what was the same? They had lunch. And so they asked each other? What was the same, what made them alike? And, it turns out that all eight of them were from a different culture, even back in 1980. And so that was the environment that we built over the years.

Irene: And so as a result of that diversity, you invested in your staff quite a bit. Tell us a little bit about why it’s also important for boards to have diversity. []

Jim: Well, I think for the same reason, because you get a diversity of thought and the world is, at least over the last years that I’ve been an executive, it looks like, and continue to be, things are changing all the time. And so, it’s global and it’s multicultural, and if these groups, if they don’t work, have vision together and what you might call a purpose, then it’s really hard to make decisions. And so culture then becomes really an important piece of it and then the planning and then of course implementation is still 90%.

Irene: Yes, I love that quote: 10% planning and strategy and 90% implementation or execution.

Throughout your book it is evident that you were a fan of creativity. So share with us a little bit about how you encouraged your employees back then, and how you encourage donors in a nonprofit organization to be creative.

Well, I think one of the things you have to think about is what is the reason why your organization should exist and that gives a purpose and vision and a framework. And then if you trust the people, then the decisions can flow and people can be accountable for what they did or what they decide. And it isn’t a manager’s fault or somebody else’s fault. It’s that they made the decision and they accepted cleaning it up if it’s a problem.

Irene: You definitely spoke about accountability and how important that is. And as much as one would dream and think that Jim Morgan is the easiest person on earth to work for and with, how did you handle things when you had to disagree, in an amicable fashion?

Jim: I genuinely tried to find out what the other person, or even if we’re negotiating with partners, where they were coming from, what was important to them or what was their problem. And then I tried to blend what I thought ought to be right with what they were doing. And that seemed to work. But we did make the tough decisions. 

Irene: So having a common purpose and a sense of importance in the work that’s being done is definitely something that you’ve underscored throughout the principles. How do you feel about optimism for nonprofits in this day and age?

Jim: Well, I think it’s even more clear than it’s been, is the role of nonprofits, because clearly the government is not effectively addressing many of the problems that we have. And one of the problems, one of the reasons that there’s too many problems, and you get into too many layers of decision-making within those government structures. And so the nonprofits, where people are smaller and focused, can make decisions. They can find new sponsors and you can just get a lot done that way. And particularly, new ideas.

For example, what we call it investing forward in nonprofit work, is that we look for a good reason and we look for a good leader and then we try to support them, not just in terms of the specific tasks that we have in mind, but giving them the confidence that they can improve their organization. In fact, we expect them to, to improve their management and their operational excellence.

Irene: Definitely something that you talk about in the book is developing that trust because with trust comes creativity and a safety mechanism of working in a place that has, similar beliefs in what is meaningful work and a great common purpose.

Jim: Well, it’s actually still lasting. So I guess it got started.

Irene: I think so too, Jim.

Jim: Actually the sayings from the booklet came from a list of a hundred tips that I collected since I was in the army in 1958. I just found them really very useful.

Irene: They are. They really are. I use them as quotes under my signature.

Jim: I saw that. Other people do that too. That’s a good idea.

Irene: I never dreamed that I would actually meet you though. You have no idea how tickled I am about that.

Jim: Oh, good. Well, I’m glad it’s helpful. That’s our main purpose. 

Irene: Well accomplished. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you and learning from you. Your applied wisdom is something that I think every first-line supervisor, every manager, every director, every CEO, could benefit from. These are the things that we eventually come to know, but when you read it again, you think, oh my God, this anchors it so beautifully. And I love your recommendation that everyone should keep a notebook or some sort of electronic tracking of important sayings, Morganisms…

Jim: Or their own name.

Irene: …their own name. That’s right. And that helps them propel towards their future with a clear path to, how do I contribute? What is my common purpose with my organization?

Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

You know, I’ve got to be honest. It really warms my heart to see so many folks like me on the line, which is not something I often experience. So I’ll tell you just being very open that it’s meaningful to me to speak to leaders of color in the community, women folks from underrepresented backgrounds. And I hope I can speak openly and honestly, on our recorded Zoom in a manner that can connect. 

Curtis, I just asked if you give me some time checks in the chat, you know, so I can see what’s going on. I had three things in mind for our time today. One is to cover what I think you need to know from the text, the academics of it all.

Second is real talk, you know, putting into application these principles and concepts based off of my experiences. And then third, most importantly, I want to hear from all of you and hopefully have a pretty active, you want to, I’m pretty loose. If you want to stop me in the middle of what I’m saying don’t hesitate to do so. I can dive in and I can go a little more into my background as we talk.

Point one here. What I think you need to know, right? The key here, bad news is good news, if you do something about it. I absolutely love that. And I picked this concept to talk about because so often you get people that are afraid to confront challenges or who want to paper over significant problems that they might see or don’t want to get blamed for things that might not be going well.

And if you’re not able in your org to create a culture where people feel very comfortable seeing and speaking when something’s not right, or even worse, if you’ve got folks that can’t recognize that something’s not right, you’ve got a pretty significant set of issues.

So this concept, I think, is just critical to good leadership and this idea of porpoising, which my takeaway is kind of how you go about getting new support, is just digging in and talking to as many stakeholders as possible, I think is a really important takeaway here. And maybe that’s really it for the academic piece.

I’m going to go straight into real talk and how I think I can be helpful to you. And then we can interweave these concepts.

Point one: do not sit behind your desk and be comfortable behind a computer. Get out there and talk to people. If there’s anything that I do poorly in this new role, it’s not being out in front of people as much as I should.

Some of that is just the sheer fact that I stepped into a storied organization, an incredible CEO who was in the role for 23 years before me and taking over an org in the middle of COVID with an entirely new set of tools operationally and culturally, has required me to spend more time inward than even I anticipated.

And that’s no good. I mean, you’ve got to be out in front of your stakeholders, your line level employees and junior staff, or however you refer to them based off of title, your board members. Your senior execs. I know many of you are at a middle management level, but you got to get out and talk to people.

Here’s how I’ve gone about porpoising in my real life at SVLG. One is that we have scheduled skip level check-ins. So at least once a quarter — we’re about 35 people — at least once a quarter, I try to talk to every non-leadership member of the team. We have a 30 minute check-in and I try to spend at least the first 10, 15 minutes of it, not about work.

The question I ask is, how are you doing as a human and what are we doing to get you where you need to be or where you want to be when you grow up? And we, we just talk, right? And it comes down to building trust, which is really the theme I hope to convey to you all today.

With those skip level check-ins at first, I wasn’t getting much. But now I get some, you know, I almost have to sift through it because people get the CEO on the line and okay, I’m ready to go. Right. And sometimes that’s legitimate and sometimes it’s griping, which isn’t as legitimate. But putting that into your schedule on how you interact and how you stay in front of the people beneath you if you have a hierarchy.

And on that topic of hierarchy, we do not have a rigid culture. I really try to have a culture where people can get to me and speak to me each week. I do office hours for one hour. Sometimes I sit there with nobody on the phone and I just do work. And sometimes there are a lot of people and we talk about gun control, we talk about DEI. We talk about anything but work. Unless people have work issues, they want to handle in a public setting. But one hour a week without fail, office hours with the CEO. Show up. Whatever you want to talk about. Culture, right? This is the last piece of your culture module. And I think when I talk about how you get to a place where people are comfortable sharing mistakes or sharing potential failures, I try to model that and do that myself.

Look at what I just said three minutes ago. I do it subconsciously. What did I say? I’m doing a really bad job of getting out, right? That’s the way I talk to my board. If I’m not doing something well, I don’t need to candy-coat it for anybody. And I’d rather tell you I’m not doing it well than have you tell me.

Right. So I try to embody that very directly with my team, speaking to where I believe I’m falling short, to try and create a culture where people are comfortable speaking up and sharing when things aren’t going well. And I think that that can be a challenge for folks. And I think often, especially with individuals from communities of color, those of us who are underrepresented minorities, you’ve got to watch your back often.

And you are often not rewarded for stepping out and saying X, Y, Z under my watch is not going great. Right. And I don’t, I don’t know, 20 years ago. No, it’s not true. Actually. I’ve always kind of been like this. Because my career started on Capitol Hill. I worked for Senator Feinstein. I did that for six years.

I went back to grad school. I went to business school and I did investment banking over a decade in the corporate space before I got recruited for this role. But this was just beat into me because in these environments, if you got up there and tried to BS your way through something, it could really turn out badly.

Like, you know, and not, not fun, right? These are really serious executives that you’re dealing with. So I kind of was, it was beat into me at an early age to take responsibility. And if you didn’t take responsibility, you’d end up worse off. But I think often we are punished. And so here what I’m telling you, but also don’t be stupid, right?

Understand your culture, you know better than me, the culture that you’re in. Maybe it starts with just your direct reports, right? A very small culture change that you’re trying to create. Where you tell them, hey guys, I really want us to be open and forward thinking and taking a look at what’s working and what’s not working. I want us to take pauses. 

That’s productive coaching language you can use, you can say, hey, I got a coaching moment for you, or, hey, I just want to take a pause and you might be able to model it yourself. You know, I thought I didn’t do a good job on X, Y, Z in leading you to this point. Do you think there were any things that you may have been able to do better?

And you might be able to ease into language like this, but ultimately this bad news is good news, if you do something about it. This whole porpoising, getting in front of stakeholders, is about building trust, right? And building trust can be harder for us, real talk, often than it is sometimes for other folks.

And so when I think about how I’ve been able to build trust, there’s three things that come to mind. First is having allies, you know, knowing who are the people that you can be your complete authentic and true self with, right? Who can you speak your truth to knowing that they are going to hear you for who you are and not finish the call and pull out the sheet for HR and, you know, ding you in, however your org might work.

So really understanding who those allies are and trying to get allies at all levels. You better have some allies on your board if you’re in a senior role. And if you’re in management, you better have some allies below you who are willing to step up and fight for you. And so that allyship is very important. I’m glad to take questions about how, how you build allies.

I think next it’s critical to put points on the board. I was very fortunate when I came into this role that we were able to get some big wins very quickly. I’ll give you an example that we had our big year-end event. This was October, 2020, in the middle of COVID, like as COVID as you could get.

And we said, you know, who are the top three people in the world that we could bring, you know, via Zoom to speak in Silicon Valley? And I think we had, maybe the President, Dr. Fauci, and maybe Michelle Obama was the third person. Right. And the reaction from the team is, whew, all right, well no way we can get to any of those. So who’s next on the list. And my view was absolutely not, you know, let’s get out and let’s get to it. And if we don’t get these three, we go to the next one and the next one and the next one. October 29th. There I am with Dr. Fauci chatting away and what I thought was a very productive conversation.

And frankly, for the most nervous I’ve ever been for an interview in my life he’s an incredible human. You don’t even need, you just give him a couple lines and he just goes off and makes you look good. But showing that, hey, I’ve got a vision and if you take these steps and if you get behind this, you can do things you didn’t think might be possible, is a way that I’ve been able to build allyship. At least I hope.

I like to think of myself as kind of an amateur outdoor person. And if you’re climbing a mountain, if you have a good instruc, it’s not like I’ve done Everest or anything like that, but just little, little things I’ve done here and there. The idea to me that is fascinating is you can get to the top of the mountain, just one foot in front of the other and you stand up there and look down and say, how on earth did I get up here?

You know, how did I even find it within myself to get this high? To me, that is what makes incredible managers, and I’ve been fortunate to learn at the, at the hip, knee or want to call it from people like that. So if you take our senior senator, Senator Feinstein, obviously I’m biased and I am a huge fan of hers.

She’s been a wonderful mentor of mine. I just, I love her to death. If you take someone like that, I would work on projects that even me having a pretty high opinion of what I could do, she got an extra 50% ought of me that I didn’t even know I had in the tank. And at the end of the day, we’d sit there asking the goal of an accomplishment and I just could not believe what I was able to do.

And it was all from someone at the top who genuinely believed in me and really pushed harder and harder and harder. And so I think finding those wins, even if they’re small, look at your org, look at your key objectives over the next 3, 6, 9 months, whatever they might be and figure out where you have some low hanging fruit to get some points on the board. And I think that can go a long way to building allyship for all of you. 

That covers kind of where I’ve tried to put these practices into play. What I want to make sure I’m speaking of openly to you all. And I don’t know who you all have in front of you, but I want to make sure I take this time to be of value to you is to think about as a leader of color, where you confront challenges that others don’t, or for women on the line, I like to think of myself as an ally. My wife is an accomplished executive, and I feel like her experiences combined with my lived experiences have given me a perspective. But I think you run into folks who are more skeptical. If I had to just boil it down as simply as I could.

Whether people don’t believe you’re qualified, whether you know, hey, you got the job. Or the only reason why you’re here is because of your, the way you look or race or gender, whatever it might be, or even things that are just subconscious, where you speak up. And someone else says the same exact idea. And it sounds better coming from somebody else’s mouth. And I don’t have good answers for you on all of that. What I committed here was to be open and vulnerable and try to speak to my experiences. I think what I’ve tried to do is, one, have an awareness, an understanding that what I say might, might be perceived differently in certain settings.

And I probably have defense mechanisms where I tout my credentials more than necessary, cause I think it’s important for me to provide the gravitas that might just be taken for granted with other people in the room, but may not be assumed of me.

I might close by saying, as I mentioned at the top and I have more content, but I really want to get this interactive to hear from you all, rather than sitting and lecturing, but where I sit and reflect, and again, I don’t have a great answer for you all, is how I would’ve acted 20 years ago. When I didn’t have the influence that I have now, I definitely think there are cases where I was spoken to in ways that I didn’t appreciate, or I saw things happen in the room that I wasn’t okay with. And I didn’t do anything about it.

That bothers me. On the other hand, I’m dense, but I’m not that dense. We have financial commitments. We have obligations on us and often we don’t have the risk, the ability to, to risk as much as others. And at that stage in my career, my risk profile and risk tolerance was pretty low.

What I commit to now is if I see an interaction of our team, if I see an interaction with the CEO, if you guys see me on interviews or anything like that, I hope what you see is someone who’s trying to be authentic. And speak truthfully. And that does give me a lot of peace, but it also comes with the way I’ve tried to present myself for roles like this, which is this is the skillset that I have. This is what we’re here to accomplish. This is the way we’re going about accomplishing it. We’re very open about where, where things go wrong and we try to fix them as soon as we can. 

But if this doesn’t work, you know, maybe I’m not your guy, which is fine. And ultimately with your teams, that’s the hardest set of conversations that you sometimes do have to have that if you do have people that just can’t align or just can’t respect you for who you are, or for whatever reason don’t listen to you when you need to get things done, it might be time for hard conversations. And that’s a big difference versus for-profit corporate settings versus nonprofits that I’ve witnessed.