About

I’m not putting my face on this.

Ike Wayne is a pen name. I’m telling you on line one instead of letting you find out later, because a set of books about honest measurement shouldn’t open with a small lie about who wrote them.

Where this comes from

I worked in this sector. Then I left.

I spent a long time inside nonprofits. I build businesses and consult outside them now. There was no scandal and no bad boss. What happened is slower and harder to put on a resignation letter: I worked out something about how the sector is built, couldn’t stop seeing it, and decided it wasn’t the kind of thing one organization fixes from the inside.

Here it is. In a business, the person who pays for the thing is the person who gets the thing. In a nonprofit, those are two different people who often never meet. Everything else — the overhead theater, the unmeasured programs, the growth reflex, the salaries — follows from that one gap.

These books are what I know, written down for the people still in the room.

If a field full of unusually dedicated people reliably produces mediocre results, the mediocrity is not coming from the people.

Why the pen name

The face is usually the product. That’s the problem.

The usual way a book like this gets sold is the author. A photo, an origin story, a keynote, a presence that slowly becomes the product. It works. It also corrupts the material, because once the author is the asset, the incentive shifts from being right to being liked.

Take the face out and that goes with it. What’s left is the frameworks, and whether they hold up inside your organization. If a chapter’s wrong, none of my biography fixes it. If it’s right, it doesn’t need my biography.

There’s a second reason and it’s less noble. Some of what I’ve written about how this sector works is accurate, unflattering, and inconvenient to say under a name that still does business near it.

The positions I write from

Two arguments. I state them once, then assume them.

Growth is a borrowed metric

Nonprofits measure themselves by growth because growth is the only kind of success capitalism knows how to name. I get the appeal — it’s legible, and it fits on a slide.

What doesn’t fit on the slide is that scale produces overhead and distance from the work. An organization twice the size isn’t twice as useful. It’s twice as expensive to run, and the people deciding sit further from the people those decisions land on. A mission thins out that way whether anybody chose it or not.

What holds up instead is community value per dollar — what one dollar actually buys the people you serve. It’s harder to graph. That’s most of why it lost.

There are two kinds of nonprofit

The first exists to do a thing. The second exists so that somebody can be seen to have done a thing. Both file the same form.

The second kind isn’t rare and it usually isn’t cynical. An organization can drift there over a decade without one dishonest decision in it. But the two behave differently the first time money gets tight — they fund differently, measure differently, and fail differently.

I don’t spend chapters relitigating this. I assume it and get on with the practical work, which is what you came for.

Ground rules

What this isn’t.

Not inspirational. I’m not going to tell you caring enough is enough. The sector is full of dissolved organizations founded by people who cared enormously, and you deserve better than to be flattered by a book you paid for.

Not a complaint. Complaint is its own genre and it’s fully staffed. Almost nothing I describe comes from anyone behaving badly. It’s what a system produces when a lot of decent people respond rationally to the incentives in front of them and nobody’s assigned to notice the total.

Not a substitute for your judgment. Where the answer depends on facts I don’t have — your board, your town, your funders — I stop and you take it from there. I haven’t seen any of that. You have.

Getting in touch

Written, asynchronous, read by me. If you’ve got a question about something in one of the books, or you’ve found an error in one, that’s the most useful thing you can send.