Here’s what I’ve learned listening to The Splendid Table…feed people’s dreams.

Every Week Lynn Rossetto Kasper encourages cooks to make amazing food and feeds their dreams that they can make outstanding dishes. It’s a great show, and Lynn’s enthusiasm is the reason for it.

Recently, a caller phoned in wanting to copyright or patent a recipe he had come up with.

Lynn could have easily smothered his dream under a thousand and four wet blankets. Recipes can’t be patented. Food companies only want to deal with professionals with credentials. It’s a fiercely competitive industry.

And if that’s how Lynn would answer her callers, she wouldn’t be on the air.

Instead, Lynn fed his dream. She told him that he should look at the lines of food that major companies put out and try to pitch it to companies where it fits in with their existing products. She told him to get non-disclosure agreements and not to let them taste it too soon lest they reverse-engineer the recipe.

It was positive. It was encouraging. It was up-beat. It makes you want to listen. It makes you want to cook. It makes you want to be daring.

And it’s how you, as an organizer, should work with your constituents.

I’ve really been enjoying We Are Everywhere. It has challenged me to seriously consider some of the anti-capitalist analysis that I had previously dismissed.

Their chapter Networks: The Ecology of the Movement is a fascinating analysis of how decentralized networks of activists can create powerful actions, such as the Seattle WTO protest. It disabuses some myths of network-based organizing (such as they create events “spontaneously”).

The authors take their cue from ants: nobody tells them where to go but they are very effective of finding the best food, sharing work, and keeping the colony alive. Looking at ant networks, they propose four rules for effective network organizing:

1. More is different: The power of networks is to have lots of individuals and small groups generating ideas, making discoveries and proposing these actions, and then to interconnect these small actors so that ideas can spread.

2. Stay small: When you get too big, communication breaks down, hierarchies emerge, and the network loses it’s dynamism. So, when groups start to reach that point, they need to divide like an amoeba…or an ant colony!

3. Encourage randomness: Just like an ant’s “random” wanderings may find a new food source, a network and a movement need some randomness to find new ways to adapt, respond, and grow.

4. Listen to your neighbors: Knowledge in a network flows horizontally, not vertically. So, for that to work, you need to connect to your neighbors and share ideas, lessons,  and information with them.

Powerful ideas, and network organizing is certainly an important tool to have at hand. That said, I’m left with some questions:

1. Does network organizing lead people to only do the fun jobs and projects? Door-to-door canvassing, fundraising, reaching out to people who aren’t already on board: none of these are as fun as organizing a reclaim the streets party, but I think they are just as vital for the movement. In a network-based organizing model, is there the structure to get these less glamorous jobs done?

2. Do we have anything in common? In a completely leaderless, flat, non-hierarchical movement, is there enough common experience or language to hold us together? For example, Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and Beyond Vietnam speech were two powerful pieces that gave people common frames for discussing the movement. Do we loose this common language in a network-only environment?

Give the article a read. It’s worth a good think.

In Forces for Good, the authors spend a lot of the time emphasizing that the great nonprofits they studied weren’t always the best managed.

Fair enough, but there’s a danger there. They may not need to be the best managed, but they do need some level of management.

Their research even proves this point. When discussing adaptation, they quote Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators who note that the “limits of innovation have less to wo with creativity, and more to do with management systems.”

You need good management and systems to get good innovation.

Crutchfield and McLeod Grant  even have a full chapter on “sustaining impact” that argues for investing in people, infrastructure, and systems.

Yes, great nonprofits are about great focus on mobilizing people toward the mission. That external focus is essential. Management is not the point and shouldn’t get the top focus. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

(Maybe I’m defensive here because right now Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice in Ann Arbor is in the midst of doing a lot of management updates. We’re spending time getting our books in order, creating procedures for adopting new programs, and creating clear personnel policies. These won’t make us a great nonprofit, but they will make us a better one.)