The Eisenhower Principle applied to Nonprofit Management
I was skimming Newt Gingrich's new book, REAL CHANGE, and was reminded about General Eisenhower's amazing success in executing strategy. In World War II, Eisenhower coordinated the largest military undertaking ever, the invasion of Normandy. He not only managed huge sea, air, and land forces, but also managed unpredictable weather as well as the political forces of Roosevelt, Churchill and de Gaulle. When asked about his success, Eisenhower said "Whenever I run into a problem I can't solve, I always make it bigger.
April 2008
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The article was by Freakonomics authors Duber and Levitt about SmileTrain. Let me briefly summarize. Operation Smile sent doctors to poor parts of the world for cleft-repair surgery. One of the members of Operation Smile realized that they would never repair all cleft palates with this approach. The doctors always left without helping all the children. By stepping back and seeing the problem differently, SmileTrain was born.
SmileTrain took a different approach. They trained local doctors on doing the surgery affordably. This greatly sped the number of surguries and is allowing a host of other benefits, like employment and income for local doctors (at a fraction of the cost of sending in teams of doctors from developed countries).
Anyway, maybe this should be called the Eisenhower approach to strategy execution.
Ted Jackson