RWJF - President’s Message

Foundation staff spend a great deal of time pondering how to approach complex social problems. If they do their homework, they will understand at a minimum what has been tried before, what the evidence shows, what confluence of forces affects the problem and the current thinking of experts, as well as the attitudes of the general public or more targeted constituencies. In the best of worlds, they will then develop a well-designed grantmaking strategy that aligns with the Foundation’s mission, culture and resources. But the critical next step is planning that strategy’s execution. In my experience, our preoccupation with strategy all too often causes us to gloss over the equally important decisions about the way a goal—or an individual program—will be implemented.
     When I first arrived at RWJF, I wanted to harness the Foundation’s reputation and moral and financial capital to promote specific change strategies. In the years since, I have come to appreciate that leadership and tactics are every bit as important as strategy. Identifying and cultivating individual leaders can be frustrating, because the result isn’t, and can’t be, totally within our control. The very human qualities of creativity, personality, unpredictability and variability in performance come into play, sometimes for good, sometimes not. Developing effective tactics requires a solid sense of how the world actually works, again a messy science at best, as conditions on the ground change, as progress is made (or not), as midcourse corrections are needed. Sometimes totally extrinsic events—like the September 11th terrorist attacks and their aftermath—can destabilize efforts that were previously on course.
     Foundations, including RWJF, tend to overemphasize strategy at the expense of execution because of internal reward structures, because of our relative isolation from the front lines, and because we typically recruit staff whose backgrounds are stronger in conceptualization than in operations. Common mistakes in planning for the implementation of a program include selecting the wrong leader, permitting lines of authority between foundation staff and the program director to become tangled, missing opportunities to communicate about the program, and having unrealistic expectations that set grantees up to fail.
     Achieving a proper balance between strategic design and implementation requires that we address each of these factors by shifting internal reward structures, staying more in tune with what is happening in the broad environment, and looking for staff who are strong in both strategy and execution. All of these are easier said than done, but at the end of the day, what matters is the strength and usefulness of what has been built, not how elegant was the blueprint.