Just as the term ‘non governmental’ implies, a non governmet

Ironically, that approach is more likely to waste time and money and reduce the odds of success than one that strives at the outset to achieve an in-depth understanding of the problem and its importance to the firm. With this in mind, we developed a four-step process for defining and articulating problems, which we have honed with our clients. It consists of asking a series of questions and using the answers to create a thorough problem statement. This process is important for two reasons. First, it rallies the organization around a shared understanding of the problem, why the firm should tackle it, and the level of resources it should receive. Firms that don’t engage in this process often allocate too few resources to solving major problems or too many to solving low-priority or wrongly defined ones. It’s useful to assign a value to the solution: An organization will be more willing to devote considerable time and resources to an effort that is shown to represent a $100 million market opportunity than to an initiative whose value is much less or is unclear. Second, the process helps an organization cast the widest possible net for potential solutions, giving internal and external experts in disparate fields the information they need to crack the problem.

It is important at this stage to initiate a high-level conversation in the organization about the resources a solution might require. This can seem premature—after all, you’re still defining the problem, and the field of possible solutions could be very large—but it’s actually not too early to begin exploring what resources your organization is willing and able to devote to evaluating solutions and then implementing the best one. Even at the outset, you may have an inkling that implementing a solution will be much more expensive than others in the organization realize. In that case, it’s important to communicate a rough estimate of the money and people that will be required and to make sure that the organization is willing to continue down this path. The result of such a discussion might be that some constraints on resourcing

The reality of entrepreneurship is that you can't do it all on your own. You need the support of talented and experienced people. This support may come in the form of interns, contractors, strategic partners and even employees. You also need the support of family members, who often need to be educated on the realities of enterprise.

But you also need people to challenge you and help you grow. The advice and council of serial entrepreneurs and investors is invaluable in helping you achieve your objectives.

There are many benefits to being a part of organizations, but the most important is, and will always be, the opportunity to connect with like-minded people. This will ensure your longevity, which is a necessary ingredient to your success.

All methodologies and goal setting techniques are tools to help your team achieve better results, but we have to remember that we are dealing with humans. People are emotional beings and by setting goals and giving tasks according to their strengths increases the odds of success, but it does not mean that you should not motivate them. The best times to encourage and motivate your team is at the beginning and the final part of the process.

People tend to get stuck and in order for them to finish their task, it is recommended to reinforce the fact that they are moving in the right direction. They should also be informed that they are a vital part of the outcome.

I want this job because I am looking for an opportunity that lets me exercise my skill with numbers and eye for detail. I feel this position will allow me to succeed because my interpersonal skills help me establish meaningful relationships with vendors, and my experience with accounting software allows me to confidently manage invoices and inventory databases.”

Your entire energy changes when you’re standing. Unsurprisingly, the entire energy of a meeting does, too. Convert one of your meetings to a standing one and watch the momentum, enthusiasm, and action soar. They’ll move faster and be more action-orientated and more likely to motivate your team. Need help convincing your boss? Throw on the benefits his or Whenever you see something from the big wide world that captures your attention, put it on display. It can be any discovery: an awesome ad in a magazine, an unusually arranged menu, or even a well-written email that made you laugh. The more provocative, the better! If you have space on a  wall near you, eke out a spot where you can display everything. Or, if you work an open office where wall space is at a minimum, do it virtually on Pinterest.

Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. Pick a colleague you feel comfortable with with and make yourselves accountable to each other. Encourage him or her to keep trying new things, whether it’s trying a new place for lunch, pitching an idea in an unorthodox manner, sharing articles that inspire, or just doing some old-fashioned brainstorming. It’s better—and easier—together.

We often think that ideas must always be big, transformative, and game-changing. But often, it’s lots of small, novel things that add up to make a huge difference. The benefits to small-scale innovation are huge. Not only do they happen quickly and (most often) without a lot of fuss, they also garner the interest and attention of both your team and organization; thus paving the way for bigger, meatier innovation projects to follow. Try changing lots of small things, like how you sign off your emails, how you reward yourself for good work, or how you kick off meetings.

We all have things we do with our eyes shut. It’s part of what makes us excel at our jobs, but also part of what blinds us to opportunities. Over the course of the day, identify all the tasks you do without thinking. Take a moment to talk about how you could do them differently. Sometimes it won’t work (spell check might always be the best way to proofread your work). However, it will often lead you to find a new way of doing the same old thing.

Stop talking and start building! Put your thoughts into words, your words into pictures, and your pictures into prototypes. When people can see your idea, they’re less likely to forget it and much more likely to take it seriously and become involved in its development and bullet-proofing. Even a bad drawing is better than no drawing.

Though it may sound counterintuitive, having constraints and parameters actually inspire innovation by forcing you to think dynamically and creatively. As an exercise, start banning things and exploring the implications. Ban words, ban resources, ban your primary target market, ban your default communication tools, and watch your creativity take off. Often, the ideas you settle on will likely be watered down versions of your initial suggestions, but the point of this exercise is to spark new thoughts on how to do the same old things.

Make a habit of stepping outside even if it’s just to walk around the block. As you stroll, make a point to notice things. If you need some discipline on your inspiration hunt, make a game of it and deliberately hunt for things that begin with the letter A on the first day, B the second, and so on. Your mind will start connecting dots between what you see and the problems you left back at the office. That’s the beauty of our subconscious.

My goals are lofty, deeply idealistic, and extremely long term — and they all tie to the cause of mental health.

I've said it before, I don't want money, fame, awards, I only want to solve the mental health epidemic in the next two decades.

Everything else is secondary — and they only become primary when it helps me do what I want to do.

I want to make running an NGO cool. I want to make this an acceptable career choice for people. You go online and look at all the people the youth look upto — and none of them, barely any, even know the founders of the largest NGO's in the world. Everyone's obsessed with Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, but, no one cares about Scott Harrison (founder of charity water). I want to show people, openly, that you can actually save lives every single day and be incredibly happy doing it. Right now, across the world there's no one who's doing it — and I want to be the one who starts. That brings me to point two.

I want to create a model for my NGO that everyone else across the world can take notes from and study to start their own. Because, right now, you have no idea how hard it is to work in this line. There's corruption, beureacratic red-tape, lack of good hires, and people don't trust NGO's and non-profits. Did you know it'll take you 8000, sometimes even less, to start a for profit company but if it's a non profit (section 8) company, the money goes well into 2 lakhs (including the bribes to speed up the process)? You don't, because, no one talks about about this. Especially in India. That, needs to change. Without giving everything away right now, I want a model based on absolute and unimaginable transparency previously unheard of in non-profits in India.I want to be in the public eye — and be come the face of mental health in India. With time, just as soon as the donation drive we're running begins on 20th August, post the campaign, I'm going to really think about the future of my own brand. I want to do interviews, appear on TV, talk more, write more, do videos more, and I want people to trust my organization because it's associated with me. This increases risk for me financially and personally, but, I'm confident the way I'm thinking of running the foundation, even though it'll set me back in the short term, in the long term, we'll become one of the pioneers of the mental health movement in the country and the world.

I don't want to leave my country. I love India, despite the corruption, poverty, grief, religious divide, despite everything I love my country and even though we'll spread out across the globe, this is where I live and die.

Finally, and this isn't a popular opinion. I want to be ambitious about mental health and I want ambition running through every inch and corner of my 70 member team — which, as we stand today, can grow exponentially anyday. I want to be one of the lowest paid members of The Wall and Us because people will expect me to — but I don't want others, to follow my path. Imagine this — you're fighting a war, a war that's claiming one life every 40 seconds (WHO), and you're asking people to follow you, work 20 hours in a day like I do, and then you tell them you'll pay them 10 — 20K (industry average)? Start-ups can at least offer equity, but, can you do the same for an NGO or a NPO? No. Why should they? Why not join a company instead? It'll work you to death but at least you'll be paid more, right? NGO's and NPO's are fighting a losing battle because the best minds of the country don't join them — I can't hire a CTO, I can't hire an exceptional growth hacker, because they know they'll make a ton more at a for profit company in the first 2 years. But, donors — those who donate to you, they'll never understand this and that's okay. So, what do we do? We create a model where we can have the leverage to find, nurture, and invest their lives to the cause. To do this? The traditional ways in which NGO's and NPO's work in India, won't do for us. Because, this money shouldn't come from hard working middle class donors who're spending their hard, earned money and expect us to make sure we do right by them — and you know what, I agree. So, we find a way where we can still retain trust — and also find the best and the brightest in the country to join me.

I want to do all of it — through vulnerability and transparency, so much of it, that it becomes downright scary.

The day I graduated law, decided to not pursue a career in it to commit to running an NGO, I knew what it m

Let me give you a more relevant example. I once volunteered for a youth mentoring program with a noble goal: to improve vulnerable kids’ performance in school and to prevent delinquency. The organizational model relied on the commonsense idea that mentoring would leave a lasting impact on these kids’ lives. In reality, though, research suggests that the effect of youth mentoring on outcomes is dependent upon time. In other words, when mentors are involved in kids’ lives for less than 13 months, the are dramatically different than when they are involved for longer periods of time. Shorter relationships are actually detrimental to youth development, while longer relationships have a positive, but weak, effect on educational and delinquency outcomes. The problem with this organization was that most of their mentors were college students who signed on for a single semester or school year, well below that 13 month threshold. Because they didn’t measure kids’ school attendance, high school completion or juvenile delinquency records, they had no way of knowing what their impact actually was. If they had built an impact measurement into their programming, they could have adapted their model — by recruiting older mentors or increasing the minimum commitment — to create more positive outcomes.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming, rather than proving, outcomes. In fact, most social enterprises rely on anecdotes to convey their impact. While these stories have their place, they cannot substitute for impact measurement.

If you’re new to impact measurement, here’s a quick and dirty guide to help you get started:

1. Do some research. Take the time to investigate the problem you’re solving and the solution you’re proposing. Interventions always have unintended consequences, as the mentoring example illustrates. It’s best to have an idea of whether A causes B (and under what conditions!) before you even think about impact measurement.
2. Define what success looks like, and make it as concrete as possible. Want to encourage educational achievement? Maybe success looks like an increase in high school graduation rates or improved test scores.
3. Now imagine how you could measure that success. It doesn’t have to be a single metric. In fact, a variety of measures is best. We’ll call these our impact indicators. Your impact indicators should be specific, clear, and measurable. They should also be outcomes rather than outputs. So in the case of the mentoring example above, you would want to track kids’ grades and delinquency rates, not just hours of mentorship or number of mentors.
4. Track your impact indicators over time. Figure out how often you want to measure your outcomes. Weekly? Monthly? Annually? Designate someone to be in charge of tracking and analyzing your data.
5. Check in. At least once a year, meet with your staff to go over your impact results. Is there anything surprising? Do you need to update your measures? Do any patterns stand out?
6. Report your findings, and invite feedback. Publish a report detailing the impact of your interventions and programs. Put it on your website and social media pages, send it to donors and investors and circulate it internally. Nothing is ever perfect. Bring outsiders into the conversation, and they’ll likely offer insights you’d never consider.

Helpful tips for along the way:

• Listen to your constituents. What outcomes are they interested in? Understanding their needs will help you focus your efforts to create maximum social value.
• Don’t forget about stories. Measuring quantitative impact is important, but not everything can be measured. A good impact report includes both quantitative and qualitative data.
• Measurement is an ongoing process. Commit to revisiting your impact indicators on a regular basis. Your impact data will be a rich source of information, letting you know which initiatives were successful and which fell flat.
• Be transparent. Store your data in Google Drive and share it with y

Theory of change is a "buzzword" thrown about by foundations, evaluators, and consultants (us included!), often referencing very different but lightly affiliated approaches. If you're reading this, you likely either have a theory of change, are frustrated with a theory of change, or are wanting to know what in the world it is before you decide whether or not it would be useful for your organization.

To make it more complicated (but also, perhaps, more compelling), there is not a single, codified way to develop and activate a theory of change. Process and product can look very different, depending on whether it's focused on an organizational, community, or field level—or being led with a primarily evaluative or strategic lens. Still, most TOC processes have a few common elements that distinguish them from traditional strategic planning or program evaluation approaches, including:

1. Focus on achieving impact, not on developing organizations. Organizational development goals can be valuable, but for nonprofits those goals must always be placed squarely in the context of "to what end are we developing this organization?"

2. Recognition that meaningful contributions to social change require ongoing reflection and action throughout an organization. Top-down strategies often don't reflect community needs and can be frustrating to implement to those not involved in developing them.

3. Understanding and valuing the fact that organizations do not create social change alone. Organizations can play an important role, but only within a larger context that engages with and builds from community power, policy change, other organizations' successes, and larger shifts in thought and behaviors. A theory of change process deepens an organization's understanding of its specific role and purpose within that context and how it can both leverage and fuel the momentum outside its doors.

.servers. Improve availability, enhance power management, and integrate solutions for mobile and branch workers. Windows Server 2008 Enterprise is an advanced server platform that provides more cost-effective and reliable support for mission-critical workloads. Windows Server 2008 Standard is the most robust Windows Server operating system to date. With built-in, enhanced Web and virtualization capabilities, it is designed to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server infrastructure while helping save time and reduce costs. Windows Web Server 2008 is a powerful Web application and services platform. Featuring Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 and designed exclusively as an Internet-facing server, it offers improved administration and diagnostic tools to help reduce infrastructure costs when used with a variety of popular development platforms. Windows HPC Server 2008 , the Microsoft third-generation HPC solution, provides a comprehensive and cost-effective solution for harnessing the power of high-performance computing. Out-of-the-box, world-class performance, and scalability enable organizations of all sizes to rapidly deploy solutions ranging from personal HPC workstations to large clusters spanning thousands of nodes. Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems delivers an enterprise-class platform for deploying business-critical applications..

Accurate, relevant, and timely data to monitor and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic

Health insurance coverage and its relationship to access to and the use of health care services Prevalence of health conditions, such as obesity and overweight, cholesterol, hypertension, and HIV status among the U.S. population

Functional status and disability

Exposure to environmental hazards that shape policy, such as exposure to leadPhysical activity and nutrition

Growth charts that are used by health care providers to monitor the development of childre Care quality and patient safety

Injuries and their impact on health status and functioning

Leading causes of death specific to age, race and ethnicity, and sex group Infant mortality, stillbirths, life expectancy, and teen births

Practice of medicine in the United States and evolution of health information technology

Changes in the health care delivery system, including emergency department use and capacity; increasing use of prescription drugs; and increasing demand for community-based long-term car

Collaborating with other public and private health partners, NCHS uses a variety of data collection mechanisms to obtain accurate information from multiple sources. This process provides a broad perspective to help the organization understand the population’s health, influences on health, and health outcomes.

Sources of data collection include:

• Birth and death certificates
• Patient medical records
• Personal interviews (in households and by phone)
• Standardized physical examinations and laboratory tests
• Health care facilities administrator and providers interviews

To help your company incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion into its business practices, we asked HR experts and business leaders this question for their best inclusion practices. From diversifying your hiring process to considering gender pronouns, there are several ways your company can incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Here are ten ways to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion into your business practices:

Get Employee Feedback

Diversify Your Hiring Practices

Create a Culture That Values Differences

Provide DEI Training

Start With Leadership

Encourage Collaboration

Promote Pay Equity

Review Your Company’s Frameworks

Consider Gender Pronouns

Build In Communication and Recognition

Businesses need to recognize that we are living in a time where diversity, equity, and inclusion are important priorities when running their companies. I reach out to my employees for feedback on how I can create a more welcoming and open environment. From their feedback, I’m able to put diversity policies in place. These diversity and inclusion policies allow open conversation and better practices within our workplace.

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) should be important to the mission, vision and value of your business. The best way to incorporate DEI starts with your hiring practices. When you hire with DEI in mind it will more naturally become a part of your culture and business practices.   

Every individual at our company knows and understands their role in our culture. We encourage all our employees to identify and celebrate their differences and find ways to use those differences to add value to their position. A top-down approach doesn't drive commitment, so when you get all employees at all levels involved, you can make lasting change. Successful organizations understand that a long-term commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is good for business increasing innovation, employee engagement and retention, customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and profitability. While there is no single approach, experts agree that a comprehensive strategy is needed to embed DEI in the workplace culture and the decisions, policies, processes, and practices that support it that is behavior-based can play a meaningful role in creating an inclusive workplace in which underrepresented or marginalized groups are encouraged to participate, contribute, lead and succeed. 

The best way to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in your business is by starting with a top-down approach. Start the necessary conversations with leadership to get buy-in from the top, then move throughout your organization to get everyone proactively involved. This way, it can be solidified in the company’s culture. 

Introducing a better business model into an existing market is the definition of a to help strategists understand how that works Clay Christensen presented a particular take on the matter in designed to make it easier to work out how a new entrant’s business model might disrupt yours. This approach begins by focusing on the customer value proposition — what Christensen calls the customer’s “job-to-be-done.” It then identifies those aspects of the profit formula, the processes, and the resources that make the rival offering not only better, but harder to copy or respond to —  a different distribution system, perhaps (the iTunes store); or faster inventory turns (Kmart);  or maybe a different manufacturing approach 

Many writers have suggested signs that could indicate that your current business model is running out of gas. The first symptom, Rita McGrath says in is when innovations to your current offerings create smaller and smaller improvements (and Christensen would agree). You should also be worried, she says, when your own people have trouble thinking up new improvements at all or your customers are increasingly finding new alternatives.

Knowing you need one and creating one are, of course, two vastly different things. Any number of articles focus more specifically on ways managers can get beyond their current business model to conceive of a new one. In look at ways to think about creating a new model by altering your current business model in four broad categories: by changing the mix of products or services, postponing decisions, changing the people who make the decisions, and changing incentives in the value chain.

In focus on the choices managers must make when determining the processes needed to deliver the offering, dividing them broadly into policy choices (such as using union or nonunion workers; locating plants in rural areas, encouraging employees to fly coach class), asset choices (manufacturing plants, satellite communication systems); and governance choices (who has the rights to make the other two categories 

These are the top four areas where I believe we need to build resilience into our business models in order be sustainable.

a. Financial resilience: Work towards profitability, because this is what true financial sustainability looks like. Financial sustainability is good business. Before you have investors knocking on your door, figure out if and how your business can survive without constant injections of capital, in your specific operating environment.

b. Regulatory resilience: Invest in compliance. It can feel prohibitively expensive, but invest in good legal and financial advice early—and follow it! Building the foundations of your business for resilience as you grow prevents you from expensive and painful “remodeling” to correct weaknesses that were amplified as you scaled.

c. Product and market share resilience: Know your customers and your markets. Spend time with them. Ensure you are cultivating strong relationships, robust feedback loops, and multiple, reliable data points to inform your product and market decisions.

d. Team resilience: Invest in the sustainable management of your most valuable resource; your people. It’s common sense and some deliberate hard work. This is the process I follow to invest in my most valuable human resources:

1. Recruit the best talent you can afford using rigorous hiring practices.

2. Hire the individuals whose temperaments and abilities complement and thrive in your specific company culture.

3. Communicate a clear vision and expectations, including around maintaining a balance between performance and burnout.

4. Create the space and provide the tools that empower your teams to deliver.

5. Trust the team you built to do great things.

6. Share the celebration and the reward when they do

• A list of all items and needs of the project
• The amount required to sustain each item
• Current resources
• Required resources
• Potential matching and funding organizations or individuals, and
• Amount that will be requested from each organization, individual or funding source
• How it will be requested (and by whom, and when)

Your plan will also look at all of these things on a long and short term basis. That is, it will help you to consider your finances for six months from now, but it will also ask you to consider where you would like your organization to be in, say, six years.

Before we move on, a last important note here is what your financial sustainability plan is not. It's not the reason you are in business - it's not why you get up in the morning. If you had wanted your focus to be money, you would have gone into banking or something similar.

Planning for financial sustainability, then, is just one part of your overall plan for institutionalization. It lets you concentrate on your real purpose, whether that purpose is helping children live healthier lives or helping adults on their spiritual path. It allows you to "do more mission," in the words of author Peter Brinckerhoff.

So, while it's important to take care of the money, don't allow yourself to get so caught up in it that you forget what you are really trying to do.

One thing a plan for financial sustainability will take, if done right, is time. It's a long process. At least in the short term, it will take quite a bit of effort on the part of project staff. What are the advantages of taking that time and effort when you already feel overwhelmed

• An increased focus on your real work. You can do more of what you set out to do, because your focus can be on the mission, not just on day-to-day survival.
• Becoming more competitive in your field. For example, more money allows you to hire more and better staff, which, again, allows you to do more to obtain your mission.
• Easier transitions. A plan can assist your organization in successful transition when current funding is depleted or dries up.
• Following guidelines. Sometimes, you don't have a choice. For example, some funders require the development of a plan for financial sustainability as a condition of their grants. By having a plan already developed, you start a step ahead.

The short answer is: it's never too early to start planning. If you need money, and you plan to be around for the long haul, you should do this from the start. Planning should take place as soon as the project begins.

Even if your organization has been around for a while and is going strong, it still makes sense to periodically dust off your plan and make sure it is still viable. Such a "check-up" might occur on a yearly basis.

On the other hand, if your organization isn't where you want it to be financially and the organization doesn't appear to be headed in the right direction, it might be time for a complete overhaul.