American Dream Homes

08/08/2023

The headline is wrong... and so is the direction that are moving in lower-income areas. Thank you, Shawn McCoy, for making the public and Greater decisionmakers aware of this trend.

A new study by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas shows an interesting trend in rent prices across the valley. Rent is increasing in lower-income areas while decreasing in higher-income areas.

02/21/2023

"The only assurance of long-term success is... self-esteem." Let's say this is true. What would it mean for our education system?

The claim above comes from the negotiations book, "Start With No" (a FANTASTIC read that's relevant to everything from sales to relationships).

Something about this claim really resonates with me. I grew up as a child with pretty low self-esteem. I had poor social skills and lacked self-confidence... except in school. In school, I excelled. So I grasped on to that as my ticket to success, and having a positive self-image in that one area took me to college on a full scholarship and got me into Top Tier institutions for grad school.


So let me pose this as a hypothesis... and I would love to hear your thoughts: if success in school is a lagging indicator that depends greatly on a child's self-image (the leading indicator), then our instruction and support services should prioritize students' self-image/self-esteem and the specific content of education should come second.

Now, I don't know what the research and data says about this (if you do, please share!)... and I'm aware that this sounds like liberal coddling (haha). But I hope we can agree that decisions for our education system should be based on data. So what would it mean for Education outcomes if we viewed them more as outcomes of students' self-image than of their focus, attention, intelligence, etc.?

Photo by https://unsplash.com/

01/26/2023

Before the board finally removed him, the CEO was offered an alternative: become a creative consultant to the company and make room for a new leader. Instead, Charney chose to "destroy it all, rather than face the prospect of someone else having even the slightest control over what he had built,” author Ryan Holiday writes of the founder of American Apparel.

Though the company was founded on fair labor practices and ethical branding, "as success came and temptations swirled" Charney slowly betrayed those principles, clinging to control and power. Investors, advisors, and employees all beseeched him to “bring on competent operators to help solve difficult problems"; instead, Charney surrounded himself with "lackeys" and people he could manipulate, rather than share power or empower others.

This is leadership parable, and one that's important for nonprofit board members to know. The sad truth is, among the millions of nonprofit founders in the world, there are some Charneys--founders whose egos have become bigger than the mission. This puts the nonprofit board in a tough spot: allow the ineffective leadership to continue, or exercise the responsibility that the public, donors, and the organization's clients have charged it with.

Are you concerned that something similar may be happening in your organization? Reach out here or through my website and let’s chat about how I can help your board assert the authority entrusted to it. And click the 🔔 icon at the top of this page if you'd like to be notified of my future posts.

You can read the American Apparel story and other insightful lessons on leadership in Ryan Holiday’s fantastic book, "Discipline is Destiny.”



Dovcharney @ Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

01/19/2023

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - MLK… including inside your nonprofit organization. Like Dr. King, maybe your is involved in some variety of the struggle for justice.

Does it also deal justly with its ?

In the ten years I have been working for and with nonprofits, I have seen organizations obtain exemptions from paying unemployment insurance, ignore their own policies on discipline and termination, and be outright indifferent to the morale of their staff. And these are nonprofits whose missions are to bring hope and compassion to the disadvantaged and marginalized.

It is a tragic irony--not to mention hypocritical--when treat their clients with more empathy, kindness, and justice than their own staff, many of whom work for lower wages (and maybe respect) than they would earn in the for-profit sector.

If you have concerns that your organization may be indifferent to its employees' , reach out to me here or through my website. Nonprofit boards have the power--and the responsibility--to right those wrongs.

-Grant

It's time to confront the harsh realities of a career in social justice.

01/05/2023

Did 2022 nearly burn you out of nonprofit work? Maybe that burnout just cleared the way for the right path forward.

Stanford Social Innovation Review released its Top 10 articles of 2022 over the holidays (https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_10_most_popular_ssir_articles_of_2022 #). Number 6 caught my eye. In “The Upside of Nonprofit Burnout,” John Hagan writes, “Driven by well-educated, well-meaning boards that do not ask hard questions (of themselves) about the root cause of the problems their organization is tackling, nonprofit staff are drowning in servicing the board, balancing budgets, growing revenue, … and looking “good” externally so even more revenue can be raised to continue not solving the biggest challenges of our time.”

Are those of us involved in the important work of social impact caught up in a system more focused on satisfying donors than solving problems? Are we using our skills and resources as effectively as we could?

Hagan says that donors and boards alike should ask themselves, honestly, whether the problems described in their mission statements are getting solved… and hold themselves accountable: “Don’t make the staff run even faster on a rat wheel going nowhere. … We have a distorted sense of what matters in nonprofits. We need a cultural change that starts with nonprofit boards, and anyone or any organization that funds the nonprofit sector.”

Frequently organizations, as well as their leaders, lose sight of the question ‘What is it that we are really good at?’ … or ‘what’s our competitive advantage in this industry of social change?'

Maybe the answer to those two questions is ‘whatever makes you come alive’—and I don’t mean what gets you out of bed in the morning, because that might just be a paycheck. But what about the social impact your organization is making gives meaning to your life?

One of the upsides of burnout is that it can force you to stop and take stock of what you’re doing and whether you should be doing it at all. Like a forest that grows back stronger after a fire has burned through the dead (but still standing) trees, burnout can clear the way for the right path forward.

If this resonates with your experience, either on a board or in leadership, let’s chat. You can reach me here or through my website.

Photo by unsplash.com/it/

12/30/2022

If everything is a priority, nothing has priority. It’s true in life, but also in nonprofit and corporate leadership.

Focus is more about saying "No" than saying "Yes."

This was one of Steve Jobs' strengths as a leader. In 1997 Apple was in turmoil. Its holiday revenue had fallen far short of the company's goals. Senior leaders began making lists of which projects would stay funded... and which would not.

In the midst of the crisis, Apple's founder and visionary leader returned to the company and began to turn things around. In Steve Jobs' view, the core problem was focus: lots of interesting projects were in the works, but the company was going in “18 different directions.”

At the Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference in 1997, Jobs told the crowd, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Aided by that focus, Apple went on to become the world's first company to achieve a market value of $1 trillion dollars.

The temptation to go in 18 different directions affects nonprofits just like it does multinational corporations. There's so much passion to achieve the mission that organizations drift from the programs they're best at, and were created to do, into programs that would be better done by others (or attempted later with adequate capacity).

What distractions should your nonprofit organization say "No" to this year to maximize the impact of your core programs?

If you'd like some help with this question or dozens of related ones, reach out here or through my website.

Have an amazing new year!

-Grant

12/19/2022

New board members often don’t know what they’re getting into.

Especially if they just joined a nonprofit board.

Hearing their stories inspired me to publish a resource I hope will be valuable to nonprofit leaders everywhere. Can I tell you about it?

It's a planner... for planning your weeks and months next year... but it's also a thoughtfully curated selection of some of the best nonprofit leadership advice and lessons I've personally learned from years of working for and with nonprofit organizations.

If you’d like to know more about the planner, you'll find more details and links to my Amazon store at my new website, grantmccandless.com

Have a happy holidays, everyone! 🕎🎄

06/12/2019

This just in... after achieving 30% annual return on investment in its first two properties (in Atlanta), American Dream Homes has identified a prefab design that is ideal for the Las Vegas climate! We are currently identifying a parcel of land to purchase for our first affordable housing development in Vegas.

Projected annual return on investment... 50% or better

Prefab affordable passive solar house kits at www.GreenModernKits.com.