The Nature Conservancy: Building Successful Business Strategies
Book Reviewed: “Nature’s Keepers-the remarkable story of how the Nature Conservancy became the largest environmental organization in the world.” By Bill Birchard
Finder’s Keepers!
Think of yourself as a treasure hunter. This book is the entire map, with a path leading you to treasures along the way, nuggets of tried and true tactics that became valuable strategies for building a successful business.
Put on your explorer’s trekking boots and carefully follow the clues to the gems of information, hidden away in this day-to-day, in-the-trenches style of reporting “the remarkable story of how the Nature Conservancy became the largest environmental organization in the world.”
If you’re willing to be patient and pay attention, you can pull amazing, insightful strategies that are essential in business success, out of each of the book’s chapters.
Set up in chronological order, this book isn’t always the easiest to stick with, especially if one isn’t into the minutia of how a corporate entity came about, no matter how fascinating.
It’s the People, Silly
The Nature Conservancy, one of the largest environmental organizations in the world, came about primarily for the purpose of preserving natural diversity.
Finding the words “natural diversity” extremely hard to define to everyone’s satisfaction, one of the early shapers of the Nature Conservancy, Robert E. Jenkins Jr. defined diversity as the ability to promote natural stability. Jenkins found that natural biodiversity was necessary to the health of an ecosystem, due to the fact that monocultures (single crops grown in large fields) easily succumb to diseases. Biodiversity offers insurance against wholesale crop loss and weakening of the DNA gene pool.
Each chapter is set up to recognize the distinct contributions of nine of the early founders within the Nature Conservancy. Understanding their business, the mission of fund raising for a “just cause”, became the first order of business to get the company of the ground.
Richard Pough often repeated the phrase “People give First to people, Second to institutions, and Third to causes.” This became the cornerstone of their mission-critical money raising efforts.
In early 1985, L. Gregory Low, a Nature Conservancy manager, was put in charge of expanding the Conservancy’s capabilities to match a larger ambition, that of having a bigger, worldwide impact.
After much trial and error, of working long hours and longer days, Low came up with a four step analytical process, he called Systems, Stresses, Sources, and Strategies.
Systems involves learning about the problem you need to solve, for example, in trying to identify the most important projects that the Nature Conservancy should fund, he needed reports that would give him all the information on all the threats to that particular bioreserve.
Let’s say they were working on cleaning up a water way. Low needed to know exactly what threatened the health of the water way; whether it be toxins from industrial dumping, bacteria from farming runoff, or the degradation of the sediment through improper land-use. These he considered his stresses.
Next, he wanted the information he was given to include the causes or sources of these particular threats, including specifics like the names of the property owners and addresses of the factories, farms or other organizations affecting the land.
Strategies consist of step-by-step plans of action addressing each facet of the problem, and most importantly, to immediately begin the work to implement those steps.
Curiously enough, Low found that he needed to add an additional “S”, for success.
One day he asked his staff, what does success look like? Astounded, most of the people in the room realized that occasionally they overworked a problem, worrying about it even once it had been solved.
The last step in this breakthrough five-step process, had been added, and it was just what the doctor had ordered. The Nature Conservancy now had an unbeatable formula for success, combining community based involvement, fund-raising, and this five point plan for effective problem-solving.
Mr. Low had realized that in order to spur an organization into a new line of business or thinking, one needed to concentrate on the peer to peer coaching available within the organization. When fellow staffers shared problems and solutions, they developed a mentoring system from which flowed new ideas and strategies, increasing productivity.
Peer recognition within the organization created new internal champions, those people who build the team that accomplishes their goals. No amount of prodding, rule making or pep talks could replace this new concept in one-on-one solution based management.
Kent Wommack, executive director of the Nature Conservancy in Maine, contributed four crucial lessons to the Nature Conservancy’s management style.
He volunteered to do more than his share, he gave all the credit for the completion of the project to others, he learned to meet others on their own terms, and he didn’t worry when people didn’t agree as to why to do something.
Bold Thinking Creates Big Results
Tina Mattingly, of the Community Counseling Service (CCS), a fund-raising firm that the Conservancy hired in 1998 to raise $20 million for the Conservancy’s projects, came up with a bold plan.
“Ask for extraordinary gifts, hold the line and accept nothing less than the biggest gifts early on. Ask people to raise their sights because the Conservancy needs more,” Mattingly said.
It was this kind of break-through thinking, hard work, and dedication, coupled with a passion to save the natural balance and beauty in Nature that helped to spur on this organization to become the largest environmental organization in the world.
