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Re-Examining Carnegie Corporation
In his first "President Essay," Gregorian outlined the process through which he proposed to begin re-examining Carnegie Corporation:
"Some of the questions I have posed to my colleagues and the trustees are: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How well are we doing it, especially in relation to the work of other foundations? How does it serve Carnegie Corporation's overall mission to advance and diffuse knowledge and understanding? Does the Corporation perceive itself as an incubator of ideas or as a sustainer of institutions that play that role? How do we combat the age-old problem of scatteration in our grantmaking, while retaining the flexibility to respond to a tantalizing idea or a target of opportunity? How do we evaluate our programs? Is there merit in recognizing the "illuminating failure" as well as the obvious success, in order to learn lessons from experience? Would we achieve our objectives more efficiently if we made fewer grants and larger commitments or many more little ones? If we know what our entry strategy is, what will be our exit strategy? How can we intelligently and imaginatively harness technological progress in order to achieve our goals? How effectively, in the electronic age, is the Corporation reaching its various audiences and constituencies?
Finally, what are some important new issues facing our nation and the world that we should deal with? Where is our comparative leadership advantage? Should we "go it alone" as we often have in the past or increasingly seek partners? How do we achieve the right balance between continuity and change? This last question is crucial, because I do not believe we should engage in change for change's sake: as we consider new initiatives, we may well reaffirm the importance of some of the paths already taken, only adjusting the emphasis somewhat.
With the assent of the board, we have begun to grapple with these issues. A fundamental concern is to forge a cohesive grant program that will do justice to the foundation's historic purposes. This will require, among other measures, finding the right relationship between programmatic and administrative expenditures in a time of increased demand for the services of nonprofit organizations; achieving more integration, information sharing, and synergy among our somewhat disparate program areas; and clarifying our policies and the foundation's expectations of both program staff and grantees."1
To avoid that bane of academicians, researcher bias, Gregorian assembled a wide-spectrum of internal and external subject matter experts to help him and the Carnegie trustees and staff in this endeavor.
"...discussions were held on current operations and possible new directions with each of our board members, various foundation heads, and some of the nation's leaders of higher education and nonprofit organizations. The views of several foreign policy analysts, political scientists and historians, heads of business and multinational organizations, and foreign leaders were also consulted.
To explore these matters further and to stimulate ideas for new opportunities, we organized five seminars with outside experts in their fields, including those who have never had contact with Carnegie Corporation as well as some of our most outstanding grantees."2
Gregorian also invited McKinsey & Co., "on a pro bono basis, to take a look at our internal policies and practices and consider how best they can serve our program purposes."3
The result of this first wave of "self-examinations" in the "Gregorian era" was, not dramatic change, but a gradual fine-tuning of the Corporation's programmatic goals, and a commitment to continuous re-examination and fine-tuning of these goals.
This commitment to ongoing self-examination, dialogue, improvement, and innovation on the part of both Carnegie trustees and staff - still strongly supported by Dr. Gregorian - continues to this day. In the 2002-2003 Carnegie Corporation of New York Annual Report, Neil R. Grabois, Carnegie's vice president and director for strategic planning and program coordination, wrote about his experience of the process in recent years:
"Carnegie Corporation's fiscal year 2002, which runs from fall to fall, fell in the shadow of the September 11th terrorist attacks, a year-long period of national mourning, recovery and readjustment to a palpably more dangerous and chaotic world. America was at war, "the foulest fiend ever vomited forth from the mouth of Hell," in Andrew Carnegie's words.
In this environment, Carnegie Corporation's mission "to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding" never seemed more salient, urgent or more in line with H.G. Wells' view that "human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.'
During this period of engulfing global instability, Corporation trustees, officers and staff checked and rechecked the validity of approaches in our programs that nurture democratic values and institutions, promote international peace, improve education systems, strengthen higher education and libraries in Africa and support individual scholarship in all of these areas. The review also sought to refocus priorities, as needed, to avoid spreading resources too thinly at a time when the sharp downturn in capital markets was decreasing the Corporation's endowment. During this review, our strategies and tactics - which have been revised and refined since Vartan Gregorian became president of the Corporation in 1997 - endured surprisingly well. Staff made relatively minor changes - for the most part, scaling back less urgent projects and scaling up more urgent ones. To provide more structure for evaluating strategies and tactics in the future, the Corporation created a Council on Evaluation to formalize the foundation's process of assessing the effectiveness of it plans and grants.4
1 Vartan Gregorian "President's Essay: Some Preliminary Thoughts: President's Essay" 1997 Carnegie Corporation Annual Report," http://www.carnegie.org/sub/about/pessay/pessay97.html.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Neil R. Grabois, "Report on the Program: Promoting Knowledge and Understanding in a Year of Change," 2002-2003 Annual Report of Carnegie Corporation of New York, http://www.carnegie.org/sub/about/ann2002-03.pdf
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