They almost always neglect systems of recruitment, training and personnel advancement, generally recognized standards of quality and measurements of productivity. Investors, corporate boards, CEOs and managers all understand that success comes not from a product or service alone, but from organizations' ability to market, distribute and improve it. Business schools, consulting firms and an expanding body of research all reinforce the value of organizational capacity and encourage leaders to take it seriously. The relationship between programs and organizational capacity is strikingly different in the nonprofit sector. The two are considered almost as competitors in a zero-sum struggle for limited resources.
Money invested in organizations is considered lost to direct service.
While for-profit managers are awash in training, research and education, and boards and investors encourage them to take organizational capacity seriously, nonprofit managers are expected to get heroic results out of their organizations with few of these supports. Nonprofits concentrate on redistributing wealth, rather than creating new wealth, and so they end up fighting for their share of the charitable pie, but not making it grow. Given the scale of the problems they seek to address, charity alone will not be enough. It will take creating new wealth that we call community wealth. This requires a deeper understanding of an organization's assets and how those assets can be more fully leveraged to generate revenues.