Landed manager; Steven McCormick's goal for The Nature Conservancy: to transform the already vast charity into the most influential nonprofit on the planet. (Profile).

Staff members at the country's largest conservation organization often recite one of their boss' favorite quotations when asked about his style: "Execution is the chariot of genius."

Steven McCormick, head of The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Va., favors those words from 18th century poet William Blake to stress the importance of strategic follow-through. The quotation goes a long way in explaining why the Conservancy is not only a favorite charity of corporations, but also a favorite partner. The organization routinely puts together deals to match its strengths with corporate needs--whether it's managing land, conducting research, jointly marketing brands or solving stubborn corporate environmental problems.

The Conservancy's record as a nonprofit is hard to beat. With its blue chip reputation, A-minus efficiency rating from The American Institute of Philanthropy and $3 billion in assets, the Conservancy has been able to set aside 13 million acres of unspoiled habitat in the United States and 80 million abroad since its founding by a small circle of concerned ecologists in 1946. Today it operates in 50 states and 28 countries and receives $400 million from individuals, foundations and corporations to underwrite its mission to preserve habitats through land acquisition.

But McCormick also favors Blake's words because he once miserably failed at heeding them. In 1984, his first managerial post was as executive director of the Conservancy's California chapter. Six months into the job, a handful of staff members protested his management style, saying he let morale fall apart, kept quiet about what he was doing and spent most of his time alone.

Recalling the criticism, McCormick, 50, says: "This is a terrible confession, but my first reaction was, 'Then we have the wrong people here. I don't want to manage people who don't want to be managed.'"

He conceded, however, that he might have a blind spot. It was then that his education as a manager began. He hired an organizational consultant. He attended Stanford's executive program. He began to emulate mentors like Tom Jones, former CEO of Northrop; Alan Seelenfreund, chairman of McKesson; and Jim Morgan, CEO of Applied Materials.

By the time he left the California chapter in 2000, McCormick had developed a fondness for two words, which he would scrawl on a board at meetings: vision and execution.

Imparting his vision, McCormick challenged California staffers to preserve regionally important landscapes instead of locally favored parcels. His efforts laid the groundwork for the removal in October 2000 of the century-old Saeltzer Dam from Clear Creek in Northern California. Dismantling the dam opened the creek to spawning by the endangered Chinook salmon. It marked the culmination of a decade of deal-making between the Conservancy and two dozen state and federal agencies aimed at restoring the ecological health of the San Francisco Bay/San Joaquin delta estuary, a biologically rich waterway that nourishes 760 plants and animals and two-thirds of California's population.

As for execution, McCormick demanded a rigorous system to target the most sensitive landscapes first. In the 1980s, he asked a dozen of California's leading biologists to name the most imperiled and uniquely Californian habitats. The result was a list of 13 areas. Though unsophisticated, this ranking of critical habitats was a milestone. "He demanded the organization look at what it really takes to be successful," explains Henry Little, who is managing director for the Central Coast field office and the man who hired McCormick in 1977.

"Now, the world"

Since being named president and CEO in February 2001, McCormick has demanded that the Conservancy look at what it takes to be successful globally. In moving from a state office to the national headquarters, McCormick took seriously the organization-wide mission printed in every annual report: "To preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.

As McCormick contemplated his task from his new corner office, two words in the statement bothered him -- "on Earth" -- because he realized the Conservancy was not fulfilling its goal. He asked his staff and trustees, "Do we all really believe in that mission?"

Everyone agreed the Conservancy fell short. So McCormick mandated that the Conservancy's 3,000 employees in the United States and around the world make adjustments. He ordered managers to kill projects lacking global significance, to redirect funds to projects yielding more return for the same money and to work across political boundaries. "Great organizations are always willing to make themselves a lot better, not just a little better," McCormick explains.

McCormick's view of the Conservancy as a global mover and shaker may seem overly ambitious. But admirers praise his earnestness, humor and congeniality. His ability to deliver, meanwhile, has earned him the respect of people he once looked to as role models. "Steve is one of the most effective conservation leaders in the world today," asserts McKesson's Seelenfreund. "Millions of acres have been preserved in large landscapes and a significant amount of biodiversity has been protected that otherwise would have been lost to development." Says Northrop's Jones: "It was California, then the U.S., now the world."

But McCormick knows he can't buy enough land to preserve all the critical species on earth. He realizes that by using innovative legal structures such as conservation easements and by devising unique public-private partnerships, the Conservancy can preserve landscapes far larger than the organization could ever protect through purchase alone.

So his strategy now is "leverage." For every dollar the Conservancy spends, he wants to reap $10 to $100 worth of influence. By partnering with other NGOs as well as government agencies and corporations, he believes the Conservancy can gain clout over enormous tracts of land, as when McCormick signed a deal with U.S. Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth in 2001 to protect and restore wild habitats on federal lands.

It helps that the Conservancy, unlike many environmental groups, has been reaching out to corporations for decades, eager to sign memorandums of understanding of how each party can help the other -- with money, people and equipment. In its International Leadership Council, Conservancy officials and corporate environmental officers compare notes on topics Ranging from sustainable forestry to global warming. Moreover, its board is chock-full of CEOs, like Henry Paulson of Goldman Sachs and John Smith of General Motors, while its 1.2 million members and 1,500 state-board trustees consist of wealthy, powerful people with broad business interests.

Already the Conservancy has scores of corporate alliances. Most recently, in 2001, St. Paul, Minn.-based 3M agreed to donate $5.1 million for four nature preserves, two each in Minnesota and Texas.

In 1999, MeadWestvaco, the packaging and specialty chemicals manufacturer in Stamford, Conn., asked the Conservancy to help it evaluate 1 million acres of the company's timberland to identify sensitive areas to be protected from harvest. A MeadWestvaco vice president, Richard Burton, praises Conservancy expertise. "As a forest products company we want to work with folks who have experience in managing lands sustainably," he says. "The Conservancy recognizes that you have to have an economic model in order to make environmental or social contributions."

General Motors has been involved with the Conservancy for the past decade. Its contributions range from the donation of 140 trucks for nature preserves to sponsoring an employee-giving program. The crown jewel is the Detroit automaker's donation of $10 million to reclaim 30,000 acres of Brazil's Atlantic rainforest that had been cleared for pasture. Only 7 percent remains of the original 400,000-square-mile forest, home to hundreds of species of trees and animals like tapirs, jaguars and the rare marsh antbird.

Of course, the Conservancy's coziness with corporations has long irked dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists, who wonder why a nonprofit preservationist is partnering with coal-burning utilities like American Electric Power. Though the partnership helps American Electric recapture carbon emissions by buying tropical rainforests that lock carbon in their growing biomass, the association strikes many as unseemly. But McCormick, like a long line of Conservancy CEOs, makes no apology.

"We'll accomplish more by [working] with business than by taking a confrontational approach," he argues. "We're proud of that, and we want to extend and expand that philosophy."

Growing pains 

McCormick's efforts to expand the Conservancy's influence have strained relations between headquarters and field offices.

Words like "global," "integrated" and "transformation" frightened staff members almost as soon as McCormick moved to his new post in Virginia. Jeff Francell, a former Conservancy field agent now working at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, says many field scientists and preserve managers had the same reaction: "Uh oh, my job is either threatened or not important."

Staff members wondered if the Conservancy's traditional method of preserving precious acreage in perpetuity through purchases was under attack. Huey Johnson, a Conservancy regional director in the 1970s whose 40 years of environmental accomplishments won him the United Nation's Sasakawa Environment Prize last year, is among the outsiders who believes that McCormick has hijacked the organization. He worries that the Conservancy has become a rainmaker for conservation agreements with dubious longevity.

"I view this as a takeover," says Johnson, who won the prize for his contributions to the environment through his work as secretary of natural resources in California and president of the Resource Renewal Institute. "I suggested to him that he go start another organization."

McCormick built his new management team using only two former members and six newcomers. He axed dozens of programs, including lodge management, issue-study groups, excess newsletters, travel programs and marketing literature. He demanded that managers create budgets for pre-existing programs without factoring in a budget increase, to force them to rethink funding priorities. He integrated national and international operations. For instance, he lumped Mexico together with Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Those who weren't fired outright were shaken up by the changes, says Mike Dennis, the Conservancy's general counsel and an executive-team survivor.

McCormick acknowledges his mistakes and has taken steps to make amends. When staff members complained about red tape, he cancelled new manuals prescribing managerial processes. When state trustees reacted angrily to top-down mandates, he issued a mea culpa and slowed plans enough to patch relations.

He admits he is impatient by nature, but believes speed is of the essence. "Land lost is land lost forever," he says. "Whatever was here naturally we will never see again on this spot. So we can't dither and tarry, and I'm going to be driving this organization hard."

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McCormick, a lean 6-foot, 5-inch Californian, came to this level of power from modest beginnings as the son of a manufacturer's representative. He entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, where he says he chose the College of Agriculture instead of the College of Arts and Sciences because the registration line was short and its faculty polite. He earned a law degree from the University of California's Hastings College in 1976. "I really imagined going into the public sector, working for the attorney general's office in California and suing bad people for the public good," he reflects.

After a stint in state government working for the coastal commission, he interviewed with Henry Little at the Conservancy. McCormick had few of the legal credentials needed for the job, notably experience in real estate. But McCormick expressed a childhood desire to be a naturalist and the personal chemistry felt right, Little says. Little took a chance on him, appointing McCormick legal counsel of the western region in 1977. By 1980, as the organization expanded, McCormick was promoted to principal dealmaker for Conservancy nature preserves in California.

McCormick's first projects were modest, like the Desert Tortoise Preserve, north of California City in the Mojave Desert, where dune buggy traffic was damaging the tortoise's habitat. Jennifer Johnson, then McCormick's assistant, says they combed through assessor's records, wrote letters to landowners and offered small sums to buy five- and 10-acre parcels to cobble together a refuge--precisely the kind of piecemeal preservation the Conservancy has moved away from under McCormick's leadership. "That's not something we'd do now because that's not enough leverage," explains Johnson, now the Conservancy's government relations adviser in California. "We're no longer an organization that just sets up preserves.

McCormick recognized that ecological diversity required extensive ecosystems, not just small refuges. A student of botany, he had long marveled at minute evolutionary differences among wildflower species. His belief that the Conservancy had to find ways to preserve large habitats prompted him to reach out to California biologists in the '80s to identify high-priority habitats.

About this time, McCormick developed his signature brokering style. In California's Coachella Valley east of San Bernardino, the endangered fringe-toed lizard, which "swims" through sand dunes, began in the 1980s to block the construction of housing, hotels and golf courses. Developers in Palm Springs fumed. In 1983, McCormick resolved the dispute by orchestrating a complex compromise. He coordinated the acquisition of 20,000 acres in three separate sites, purchased with a combination of Federal money, private donations and a per-acre fee paid by local developers. Part of the acquired land was set aside for natural habitat and part for development.

McCormick's deal-making has since become modus operandi. He got the chance to codify his approach nationwide in 1994 when the organization's then president, John Sawhill, a former McKinsey consultant and deputy secretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter, asked him to revamp Conservancy strategy based on the method McCormick undertook in California. McCormick has since committed the Conservancy to protecting 600 ecosystems across the country. His plans also call for more business-like milestones by setting targets for membership growth and public funding, and by measuring actual performance in biodiversity protection by rating both the level of threat to a landscape's biodiversity and the health of the species in that landscape.

After 16 years as the state director of California, McCormick left the Nature Conservancy in 2000 to start a law firm. Within months, he was coaxed back to fill the void created by the death of Sawhill. "I love having a cause," he says.