June 27, 2002 | Read Time: 3 minutes
This is a humble request to each of the chief executive officers of the nation’s 100 largest private foundations: Please start a skunk works — a small, loosely run group that promotes creativity and innovation among your organization’s brightest minds.
The original “Skonk Works” was a liquor still where something was always brewing in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner. The name was adapted by the Lockheed Corporation, the predecessor of the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, more than 50 years ago. Several other corporations, too, have had versions of an internal innovation center for many years.
Lockheed devised the skunk works to gather the most audaciously creative minds in the company, free them from day-to-day responsibilities, and give them the luxury of thinking wild thoughts — or, in modern cant, to think outside the box. Many an impractical idea issued from the skunk works. So, however, did fundamental innovations, such as America’s first production jet aircraft, the world’s fastest jet plane, and stealth technology for the most advanced fighters and bombers.
Lockheed executives recognized that a large corporation is not necessarily the best environment for the promotion of new ideas. An internal “group think” can evolve over time that values conformity to the culture over the generation of revolutionary thinking. The skunk works liberated the best minds in the corporation to wrestle brilliant ideas into reality.
Private foundations, as organizations, have not grown as large as Lockheed, but their cultures have evolved in much the same way. Over the past decade, as Stanley Katz, a Princeton University professor, noted recently, grant makers have been marked by a “general narrowing of focus,” characterized by “more narrowly specified agendas.” It is fine for foundations to seek stronger results through strategically focused grant making. But many foundations have not recognized the costs of becoming more strategic: loss of flexibility, creativity, and receptivity to ideas originating outside of the foundation.
The call to establish skunk works is not a criticism of strategic grant making. It is, however, a call to preserve a space for what might be called intellectual entrepreneurialism within the largest private foundations. Big foundations have enough resources, both human and financial, to create a sort of preserve for nonstrategic experimentation. There, great ideas that do not fit any of the foundation’s strategic plans can flourish, whether those ideas bubble up from fertile minds inside or outside of the foundation.
Lest anyone object that the skunk works itself is an outmoded concept, consider what the management expert James C. Collins says in his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . And Others Don’t. A trait of the 11 companies that Mr. Collins identified as truly great performers was their practice of removing their best people from internal problem-solving activities and assigning them to develop new opportunities. The executives running great companies understand that the most one can hope to get from a problem solver is a solved problem, while an opportunity seizer can transform a company from a good one into a great one.
The largest foundations should give their best people a generous budget with which to experiment, a minimum of supervision, and encouragement to leave the office and hobnob with the most creative and experienced minds they can find in the outside world. And when they come back with transformative ideas, they should find a way to incorporate that thinking into the foundation’s strategic plan — or build a new plan around it.
Chances are, foundations that do that will not only gain a reputation for creativity, but the programs they support will produce better results. In other words, the foundations will move from good to great.
Joel J. Orosz, former program director in philanthropy and volunteerism at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, is distinguished professor of philanthropic studies at the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership, at the Grand Rapids, Mich., campus of Grand Valley State University.
