Beware Prometheus' consultant: build with committed, energetic, competent people.

SO I said to Prometheus, "You can do this. You think you're just a regular guy, but you're not. You're a titan, a veritable giant among men." Prometheus was pretty smart, but he wasn't convinced at first. I had to keep after him. I told him, "No one else is in your position. The gods are vulnerable. If you plan it well, you can get it from them. Then they won't be able to get it back, and human beings will be eternally grateful and people will remember your name forever."

We worked for months. Finally, he was ready. Just like we planned it, he waited for the gods to look away and then he sneaked right to their hearth and --wham--he put the little flame into the hollowed fennel plant and raced back down to his companions. Just like that, they had it--fire. Beautiful, strong tongues of fire everywhere. For keeping warm, cooking, even cleaning. Boy, that Prometheus was a great client. It was a breakthrough performance. And, you can do it too.

THE MYTH OF BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE

If the Greek mythical figure Prometheus had had a consultant, this is what he might have sounded like. You might recognize the message, because it represents a significant body of management literature, especially from the for-profit sector. You can recognize the message by code phrases like "break through performance," "high performing," and "stunning achievement." The practitioners of this promethean school of management exhort their followers to ever greater heights and ever more superlative accomplishments.

What's wrong with this approach? Nothing. Just don't take it too seriously. And make sure no one else takes it too seriously, either. There can be no more intimidating--or dangerous--group in the nonprofit sector than the board of directors that becomes obsessed with promethean performance.

Some who wish always to get the most out of their organizations could take issue with this caveat. Why shouldn't we strive to be "the best in the world" at something? Why shouldn't we set big, audacious goals?

The problem with these disarmingly ambitious recipes is that they're not what the nonprofit sector is all about. It's not even what a good part of the for-profit sector is all about, but that's another story. Olympian strivers and their organizations are a minority in all parts of our economy. They gravitate more readily to the for-profit sector because of the opportunity to build very large organizations there, and to reap equivalent rewards.

By contrast, most nonprofit organizations and their leaders strive to be the best in their community, not the world. Curing cancer is the legitimate goal of only a relatively small group of organizations. Helping cancer patients is the purpose of the rest. One could argue that the former group really should strive for "breakthrough" performance because that's the only way that a cure is likely to be found. But what constitutes breakthrough performance for a cancer care organization? What is the metric? Does one even exist?

IT'S ALL ABOUT SCALE

A big part of this apparent tension has to do with scale. Publicly-held corporations competing globally do have to put out a big effort, and when they succeed they make a big impact. Theirs is truly an effort of heroic proportions--as commonly defined.

And that is the source of the problem. Much of the promethean management literature is inextricably linked to large-scale operations, global companies, and massive business entities. Moreover, the large scale is tied to large financial returns. The result is that the for-profit world's business advisors have a kind of radar screen for hero detection, and almost by definition no CEO will appear on that screen unless he or she is involved with large-scale operations.

It is for this reason that for-profit business executives are lionized for taking their companies public in an Initial Public Offering while nonprofits leading successful capital campaigns--which are this sector's equivalent to an IPO--go unnoticed.

The nonprofit sector has a different scale. The vast majority of nonprofit public charities have total revenue of less than $1 million a year. Even the very largest nonprofits don't approach the global scale of some corporations. So if we use the large scale profit metric as a guide, nonprofits are nonstarters.

BREAKTHROUGHS ARE DIFFERENT

But nonprofits need heroic efforts too, they just need them in a different way. Most nonprofits' important breakthroughs are with the clients they serve, not with their organizations, because the organizations are usually secondary to the clients. You'll notice in the heroic management literature the reverse logic--breakthroughs are always made by organizations, not their consumers.

Paradoxically, advisors to those on the for-profit side give far too much credit to those identified as high-performing executives. Individual executives' personal efforts seem more effective because they are magnified by the various support systems and leverage points of large-scale companies. The mainstream press often displays a profound ambivalence about the accomplishments of business executives, and probably this is because in some way they recognize that successful business is rarely just a story of individual effort.

By contrast, the individual efforts of nonprofit executives are largely unleveraged by their smaller organizations. This is why streetsmart managers in many nonprofit organizations feel simultaneously so exhilarated and exhausted by their jobs. There really is very little between them and the people they serve.

In recent years, more and more management consultants and intellectuals with strong roots on the profit side have begun paying more attention to this sector. This is all to the good, for many reasons. Less desirable is the uncritical transfer of distinctly for-profit concepts and philosophies. Without a more carefully calibrated approach to this unique sector, they tend to measure it and try to motivate it in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons.

By the way, Prometheus' consultant didn't give you the whole story. When the gods found out what Prometheus had done, they sentenced him to 30,000 years on a mountain top with an eagle pecking at him constantly. Even on probation he had to carry part of the mountain with him. True heroes concentrate on building organizations composed of committed, energetic, competent people, and they leave the heroics to the gods.

Thomas A. McLaughlin is a national nonprofit management consultant with Grant Thornton in Boston. He is the author of the book Nonprofit Strategic Positioning (John Wiley and Sons, 2006). His email address is [e-mail]