Hi everyone. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I try to call out crappy or nonsensical things in our sector. (Those of you still using double spaces after periods, I will hunt you down!) And every time I do, there’s usually some pushback, such as detailed in the recent #DAFGate. I don’t mind it, and in fact, I like it, because as a sector, we need to be a lot more assertive about our needs and to be able to argue and defend our points of view. (Plus, I failed at being a lawyer, so I like arguing with people to make up for it.)

However, there is always a line of pushback that is predictable and tiresome, and it’s summed up with “well, that’s the rules and we need to follow it.” For example, last week I posted about the nonsense of delusional funders requiring an accounting for what their specific grant pays for, forcing nonprofits to play a pointless and time-wasting game of Financial Sudoku. Like a funder or donor giving $5,000 and needing to know whether that money paid for pencils or insurance or whatever. It’s as if I hired a plumber to fix my leaking sink, paid them $500, and then demanded to know what they spent that $500 on (“And no more than $50 of the money I paid you to fix the sink had better gone to paying your rent, Eddie, because that’s overhead!”)

Amidst the sea of agreement, one colleague wrote “Hardly anyone here has a clue about GAAP, I gather?” Now, I’m not going to judge someone based on a single comment on social media, and I’m not going to address the accuracy of whether Generally Accepted Accounting Principles require organizations to break down which funder is paying for which portion of which line item, because it’s not relevant.

What concerns me is that this line of thinking is so prevalent in our sector: The idea that doing things the “right” way, which means following the rules no matter how nonsensical and ridiculous, is somehow more important than actually solving the issues we set out to solve.

I’ve mentioned in the past the difference between “doing things right” and “doing the right thing.” Discussions on the importance of this difference has been going on for years, usually in business or management contexts. Peter Drucker said, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Read the full article about doing the right thing by Vu Le at Nonprofit AF.