I'm on a few non-profit boards and one of the things I don't see the author mention at all or specifically is the primary directive of the board is the financials. The CEO/Director is in charge of the day to day operations. The board has very little interest in that. A non-profit will have some or most of it's money from donors and those donors want to make sure that donation is being spent effectively. And that is where a good or bad board becomes responsible.
If the money is being spent to drive the mission of the non-profit successfully no one cares. We show up for the board meeting, order sandwiches, and ask questions. And plan the next meeting.
If the money is not being spent effectively or the mission isn't being met well we ask questions, sometimes offer advice, or raise more money. Maybe staff need to be changed or a new director hired. The board does not need to know the technicalities of the non-profit it just wants it to be governed with good care.
You can't operate a non-profit the same technique as a for-profit. They are orthogonal in duties. A true non-profit has to spend almost every dollar it takes in. The board is all voluntary and there is nothing in it for them, except those sandwiches!
I think you're missing the trees for the forest, in the same way the OP describes. If you don't take interest in, and pay attention to the significant details, there's no way you can understand whether "... the money is being spent to drive the mission of the non-profit successfully...". I have served on a non-profit board and observed this problem.
I'm on the board of a very small non-profit--actually a student organization (that all of the board belonged to at some point in time, often quite a few years ago).
We actually pay quite a bit of attention to financials and discussing them takes up a decent chunk of a board meeting including whether fundraising letters are going out (and reviewing them), overall financial situation, lease renewals, larger purchases, etc.
As for responsibilities, I'd say it's a bit of a mix. There's an executive board--which I'm on--where specific responsibilities are pretty clear. The rest of the board probably much less so other than showing up for meetings.
>A true non-profit has to spend almost every dollar it takes in.
We certainly try to have a reasonable reserve. And, fortunately in recent years, we've been able to fulfill the basic mission while staying in the black.
> You can't operate a non-profit the same technique as a for-profit.
Keep in mind that profit maximization subject to a budget constraint and cost minimization subject to an output constraint are equivalent problems. A non-profit ought to minimize the resources expended to achieve a given "mission" or maximize the amount of "mission" it can achieve for a given amount of resources (depends on the circumstance), but achieving those does require it to act like a profit-maximizer.
In reality, non-profits are promotional vehicles and power exercises for people behind them with "mission" being secondary. And, obviously, people who are involved in non-profits do personally profit (reputation, influence, networking -- and in some instances by steering non-profits to spend money on things that benefit their other directly profit making activities).
much like a startup, the key thing to understand about non-profit boards is that the board members' primary job is to fundraise (directly or indirectly) and secondarily to make productive introductions (donors, partners, 'customers', funding organizations, etc.).
a distant (but not insignificant) third is strategic direction, which is often what we imagine board members do, but that's a relatively minor part of the role. some board members might have some operational input, but that's usually not expected for any but the smallest non-profits.
This matches my experience on a small arts non-profit. People were added to the board rather explicitly for their fundraising contacts. I was there partially for my arts contacts, but mostly because I was shameless about hitting up local politicians for grants and such.
The executive director was in charge strategy-wise, the rest of us were along for the ride. Because of my particular role, I had considerable say over which artists were involved, but almost no input on overall direction.
Because of the fundraising focus, it could be stressful at times (there's never, ever enough money), but working the government systems was very educational and I'm very happy about the time I spent doing it.
"that the board members' primary job is to fundraise ... and secondarily to make productive introductions...."
Although this is a common structure and plan, there are plenty of nonprofits structured differently than this--especially if the nonprofit is small and has only one or two employees, or maybe none at all.
Yes it can spend on salaries. In fact this is one of the failure modes of a nonprofit that a board has to watch out for: the staff (especially the executive staff) soaking up all the fundraising with raises.
Nonprofits don’t have investors who are watching their own personal financial returns carefully. The “returns” of a nonprofit are the mission. So the board has to do the work to verify that the money coming in is being used to advance the mission. You have to pay salaries to do that of course… but not overpay.
> Wasn't the New York Stock Exchange a nonprofit organization for quite some time?
Yes and the NFL is a nonprofit today! It exists as a neutral body to organize the league. The individual teams are for-profit.
I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses. Many if not most nonprofits only operate through the will of a single person (usually the executive director) or small number of people, and this can remain true even in nonprofits with eight-figure budgets. In HN terms, startups don't have strong boards either, because startups only have a small number of people working at or in them.
In addition, the more people there are on a board, the less likely it is to do anything, thus leaving the executive director to run the show.
So, as in many things in human life, there is the nominal, stated function, and the actual function. Board members are often cultivated for their ability to donate, not govern (or, sometimes, their ability to provide political cover). Volunteers are similar: https://seliger.com/2014/04/20/volunteers-nonprofits-really-....
I suspect the author of "Nonprofit Board Are Weird" knows or suspects much of this.
There have been any number of experiences in my life that I did not appreciate until decades later, sadly in some cases after the person who gave it has passed away.
Being a member of an exceptionally well run club in which I was one of the youngest members was one of them. This club wasn't strictly a volunteer group but it put on fund raisers twice a year which turned it into one.
Successful volunteer groups have a number of things. They have a leader with some sort of coherent idea of what we should be. They have a stream of new enthusiastic members that can muscle through plans and projects that are at risk for falling apart. And they have old members who are practically spectators, and whose primary contribution (besides perhaps being a reliable source of dues) is as story tellers. They know Chesterton's Fence. They can tell you why it's there. They remember who has helped the club out of scrapes, and whether they are likely to do so again or that charity has run out.
The oscillation in clubs comes when the leadership gets too involved, too invested, and either burns themselves out or starts alienating people. There's something to be said about keeping things a little at arm's length.
A group I used to work with went and turned themselves into a non-profit, and created a board. The board was half people who most of us had never heard of, that in theory could open doors, most of the rest were sort of honorary titles, bestowed on the more gregarious long term members but not necessarily the people I'd want in that position. I moved around then so I don't know how or if that board has strayed from the group culture before they formed.
I do agree that many non profits function because of the will of the ED / CEO and a small group of staff.
Volunteers are always interesting - and depends on the board.
Some boards become obsessed with adding people to the board. Many boards have little to no on boarding process. It’s kind of like being hired for a part time job, and then being told that you come into work once a month/quarter/ annually.
(This is an exaggeration to make the point).
Many times the most functional boards are those that embrace working on governance and fundraising.
I agree 100% about adding board members for the ability to donate, or political cover. The right board members can add instant credibility to your organization.
Unrelated — grant writing can become very hard work! I am glad you are helping organizations navigate that process.
I served on the non profit board of my local arts centre. Worst decision of my life. 7 years troubleshooting impossible HR problems. At one point I had to take a two weeks off work to carry out disciplinary proceedings against someone who had been a family friend. Constant childish complaints from employees who refused to communicate with each other and expected the unpaid board members to resolve thier stupid problems. The whole thing was a basic income program for dysfunctional people, it didn’t produce much in the way of art. I strongly urge anyone considering joining something like this to make sure they understand how badly it can go wrong.
Seems like a general mismanagement of an organization and has nothing to do with non profits. Handling of employee complaints is not the Board's job. There should be another layer of management responsible. I'm curious why you stayed 7 years.
I've served on two nonprofit boards with a combined time of about 22 years or so on them. Both were/are much more engaged than the boards described in this piece, but I think they are an exception.
The other thing I'd add as a nonprofit board responsibility is to be the final owner of the organization's mission and values, and to make sure the organization sticks with them. To a large degree, this is deeply entwined with evaluating the CEO, since one way a CEO can fail is to let the org drift off mission or fail to live up to its core values.
Another thing I'd add, at least for smaller orgs with few employees, is that the board can be part of regular long-term strategic planning (1+ year plans) and budgeting discussions. But of course this requires a more-than-normally engaged board to be useful.
I find this interesting because it was suggested (not urgently) that I could be on the board of a local food bank. This article did not even mention D&O insurance, but they said they would have it.
What scares the sh&t out of me is being financially responsible for anything any volunteer ever does (and possibly that not being covered by the insurance). None of the comments so far mention that either. Is that fear overblown?
>Board members who can't say much about where they expect to be highly engaged, vs. casually advisory ... don't seem like great bets to step up when they most need to (or stay out of the way when they should)
Indeed, I have no idea what I would do, so probably I should stay off.
IANAL, but I was once advised on this by a friend who was. In short, the justice system is very biased in favor of non-profits such as food banks. Nobody needs to tell a jury "if you award $$$$$ to the guy who ate the bulging can of bad tuna, that'll mean a whole lot of needy people going hungry". A lawyer deciding to sue the Food Bank (or a Director of the Food Bank, or ...) knows that "Defend the Food Bank, for Free" is the sort of "+10 to your own Reputation" side quest that some real heavyweight law firm might find irresistible. Etc.
Well, you have a point. I thought of it as "suing me" but maybe "suing the food bank" is the right formulation.
I hang out with one of the "gleaners" (the people who pick up the unused food from the supermarket), a former engineer, and he seems to be the business sense of this operation. They've been inspected by the big, successful food banks, so it's not some fly-by-night operation.
Again IANAL...but I'll speculate that the "sue you" risk is very context-dependent. If you're a local Big Shot, and wealthy enough to target individually, and so hands-off that a jury could be convinced that you're "kinda turning a blind eye to problems you shoulda known about and done something..." - maybe there's some risk. If you look more like a well-intentioned little guy, not savvy about legal & big-picture organizational problems, and are week-to-week involved enough to be aware of stuff like inspections or "systematic issues" - then I'd say you're at very little risk, even before the O&D insurance kicks in.
(And in general - if you aren't a savvy big shot, then you want to be fairly involved with any organization that you're a Director of. If only so that you don't look stupid, if things don't go well.)
> What scares the sh&t out of me is being financially responsible for anything any volunteer ever does (and possibly that not being covered by the insurance). None of the comments so far mention that either. Is that fear overblown?
I don't think it's overblown, and should be something to research and understand. I'm on the board of my condominium corporation (same idea as an HOA), and there are specific laws outlined in the Condominium Act here in Ontario around directors, as well as the corporation declaration and bylaws.
To try and briefly summarize, there are two things that largely protect directors in my case. First, the corporations insurance policy, includes directors liability insurance. So the corporation is purchasing insurance that covers all directors. It's actually in the law that the condo corporation shall purchase this insurance if reasonably available.
The second, is so that people actually volunteer for these boards, the laws for the most part will hold harmless a Director that is acting in good faith. And there is context, that the board is expected to be made up of individuals with various background and no specific expertise or qualifications.
There are carve outs for certain specific breaches. But it's mostly in the realm of your not covered if you breach your duty to act in honesty and good faith.
In other contexts I don't know the laws, as I operate on a board specifically governed by the condo act in Ontario. But if you are considering boards in other jurisdictions, I do believe it's prudent to do some due diligence and understand potential liabilities. But in most jurisdictions I'd expect fairly strong protections for board members.
The author is making some broad generalizations ("Board members often know almost nothing about the organization they have complete power over") that don't match what I've seen as a nonprofit board member.
There are certainly best practices out there, as nonprofit management is a very developed "industry" in the United States and I suspect other countries as well. I don't know why he had trouble locating this information. Identifying a capable and engaged executive committee and limiting tactical committees and projects in favor of strategic planning will go a long way to making for an effective board.
Small nonprofits will seem chaotic as there are too many things to do, (usually) no full-time staff to manage it, board members who don't participate and/or make demands that are not practical, poor financial management, launching important tasks that are never completed, and badly written bylaws at foundation that cause problems for years after they are written.
More like "bad nonprofit boards are weird", though there's definitely some truth to - great power, low engagement, unclear responsibility, and zero accountability. But a good board and CEO/ED will address all of these.
First and foremost, board members are volunteers. They need to be people who are invested in the organization and its mission, and would be available to help as needed. They're also consultants. The board I'm on has people with expertise in HR, finance, accounting, marketing, medicine (very useful since COVID), economics, education. All of their experience is incredibly valuable in different ways, especially since the non-profit ("medium"-sized at 1.5MM annual revenue) can't really afford those roles.
Engagement and responsibility has been a challenge for us, but we've addressed it by keeping up on best practices, which includes self-evaluation of the board and its members. As a result of that, we've invested in our onboarding process so new board members know what expectations and responsibilities are. We have various committees that focus on certain areas (e.g. finance, governance, fundraising, strategy), where board members meet outside the formal bi-monthlies to engage with staff more directly and help guide and support the organization.
Overall, I've had a great experience being a part of this org. Maybe the board I'm on is just a unicorn...
Karnofsky co-founded a very successful charity evaluator 15 years ago then moved on to co-founding and leading a grantmaker that has a budget in the hundreds of millions a year. I doubt any flaws in his analysis come from not seeing enough orgs and hastily judging.
This is similar to a board I am on. Good orientation. Well-defined roles. Plus good meetings and enough self evaluation that we know what we need to work on.
As the org has grown we have had less need for nitty-gritty skills and more need for high level thinking and directional strategies.
There are certainly plenty of dumpster fires in the non profit world, but I doubt it is that much different from the business world.
I think the weirdest thing about non-profit boards is that people in general pay (in the form of donations) to be on them, as opposed to for profit boards where the money flows the opposite way. Much of the interaction between the board and management is designed to keep the donations coming, which can create a real conflict between good governance and financial stability.
My town has an elected position called the "board of library trustees" which has just a few powers, including notably the ability to hire a new library director.
There are usually vacancies and poorly-contested elections for the position, even this year when the director resigned and the town had to search for then hire a new one. The job has a fair amount of influence on a critically important part of civic infrastructure, but people don't seem to be stepping up to do it.
Every time there's a vacancy I took at the state handbook that describes what your job should be if you're one of these trustees and I decide I am not confident I could do those tasks as well as the job deserves: https://mblc.state.ma.us/for/2012-Handbook.pdf . It's a LOT!
The assumption that boards aren't engaged seems really strange to me.
Of the two nonprofit boards I've been on (one very well functioning, one not so much), both have had highly engaged board members.
He also seems to be assuming mid-sized or larger nonprofits. For nonprofits with very few employees, or low budgets, board members often are brought in for their expertise, and their willingness to get in and do the work that would be done by employees in a larger nonprofit. If you can't pay them as employees, and they are volunteering their time and expertise and are highly engaged, it makes sense to put them on the board. Why wouldn't you?
> He also seems to be assuming mid-sized or larger nonprofits
I think that's it in a nutshell. Or super ambitious nonprofits gunning for Effective Altruist funding by having the most Silicon Valley approach to operating and expanding possible.
In the rest of the nonprofit world, the board member with the legal background is there for legal advice, the one with the media background to help promote its work; if both of them think performance metrics is one for the board member with the accountancy background to look into rather than for them to study and challenge, that's fine And firing the CEO (an experienced middle manager who took a massive pay cut to get involved) for not hitting KPIs is wayyy down the list of useful things they could be doing
> He also seems to be assuming mid-sized or larger nonprofits.
I think that's really the kind of org he's trying to talk about, even if he doesn't spell it out as well as he could. Some of these small orgs tend to be more tight-knit and the board is more of a formalism, overlapping in large part with the operations. There are certainly some small orgs that I think you can hold his analysis up to, though.
Mostly paying attention to large nonprofits aligns with his experience founding one of the best-known charity evaluators in the world and then spinning off to co-found a multi-billions-backed grantmaker which is giving out hundreds of millions a year and trying to ramp it up.
I was involved with a non-profit with a low-eight-figure (USD) budget. The board members were chosen because they either had money or had influence over people with money. In other words, busy people. Over the years the CEO reduced the amount of information that got to the board, in part by replacing competent staff with lackeys, and the reality of the organization diverged ever further from the stated objectives and value.
Oh boy, can I relate to this! I have spent about a decade working for nonprofits and I think they are extremely weird organizations with no good accountability or feedback loops built in unless the CEO and Board choose to implement them. The quality of the organization almost completely flows from a few highly engaged board members, one or two donors that may give the majority of funding, and the CEO. If they are spectacular, you get a spectacular org, if they suck, you get a sucky org (and maybe some crimes as well).
Because the thing is, the customers of the nonprofit are the donors which purchase the marketing story of nonprofit and nothing else. It is sort of like bitcoin, there are no fundamentals, just the hype and hope and that is the only fuel needed. The actual programmatic activities of the nonprofit do not need to bear any resemblance to the marketing story the donors purchase. If you are very good at telling that story, you do not need to answer to the donors at all on the real performance metrics of your org. A very large donor may demand to see these fundamentals, but you don’t need them if you have smaller donors. Grant making foundations also often demand fundamentals and measures of effective philanthropy, but you can avoid taking any grants that expose you to too much governance.
And finally the board tends to be the society of friends of the CEO, so they very rarely do anything but use their connections to boost the money and influence of the org.
In the end; the CEO does not need to answer to the board, the donors, the beneficiaries, the shareholders, the IRS, the Gates foundation or the employees. They answer to their own conscience.
In my experience there are two types of boards in the for-profit space. If the company bootstrapped itself to profitability without taking any or very much investment, and especially not taking investment from experienced investors, the board will be a bunch of friends of the CEO who rubber-stamp everything.
For companies that either are already public or are in the pipeline of venture capital start up to acquisition or i p o, the board dynamics can be very interesting and well dynamic.
The main difference is that in this case the people who sit on the board, the startup founder CEO usually, and representatives of the various investor groups, have usually done this before and have a play book. Their objective is to maximize the return on their investment, and that's what they do professionally.
Unfortunately, in my experience, in spite of the fact that this should result in a much more functional and experienced Board of directors, somehow things still end up getting pretty weird in a lot of cases. It mostly comes down to Ego and head games various directors seam inclined to play, often having to do with previous interactions or rivalries between investor groups. Also, CEOs are often cut from a certain type of personality cloth that plays into this gamesmanship. I'm not talking about the founder CEO , I'm talking about the CEO that was brought in to scale the company up and prepare it for acquisition or public markets. He ( it's almost always a he) needs to think about his own career, especially if things aren't going as well as everybody would like to think they are. It often boils down to a game of prisoner's dilemma.
When this sort of thing gets out of hand, it can begin to feel like some sort of five dimensional poker game where you don't even know the rules. A bit like the game Mao if anyone remembers that.
The notion that non profit boards are self appointed and answerable to nobody doesn't seem universal. In the model I am familiar with (the French one), non profits typically have broad and open membership, and that membership elects the board. In fact, I find it difficult to find non-profit with self appointed boards to be quite as legitimate. While the board doesn't actually own equity as shareholders would in a for profit, since they are answerable to nobody, they effectively run the organization for their own sake. They might have a charitable agenda, but there isn't much holding them to it.
But there are lots of organizations that don’t collect fees from a broad membership base like this. Most scientific research funding comes from a small number of large donors. It wouldn’t make sense to give equal voting rights to all donors if their donations are of very different amounts. Are all these French nonprofits allocating votes proportional to donation size?
I would add that the probability of a task getting done, is inversely proportional to the distance between the people deciding about the task and the people who will actually do it.
Since the board members are almost never the people implementing the decisions, the plan is much less likely to get executed. The decision needs buy-in from the CEO and then the employees. Since the board members don't spend much time with the CEO and employees and they have a very different view of things, that buy-in is likely to be weak, so the plan gets watered down every step of the way.
Really makes you realize why things are so inefficient in public organizations and politics.
In a two person startup, if the founders decide to do something and they are the people executing on that decision, the task is very likely to get done fast and in full. If a non-profit board decides to do something, not so much.
Usually the Executive Director is making decisions for the organization, not the board. They are getting approval on their high-level strategy and budget from the board, but all of the day-to-day decisions lie with them.
Regarding charities, I highly recommend watching this Ted talk on how the way people (generally) think about charities is wrong - https://youtu.be/bfAzi6D5FpM
I have served on a lot of private company boards (VC-backed companies) as well as a mnumber of non-profit boards. I agree with the sentiment that non-profit boards are weird, and I have found them significantly less productive than for-profit boards. Comparing for-profit and non-profit boards, I see several key drivers of non-profit weirdness:
* Definition of success: With for-profit boards, there is a clear shared view of what the long-term goal is: value creation for shareholders. While there are lots of healthy debates about how that is accomplished, they are all in the context of the same goal. With a non-profit, each board member may have their own view of what the org is ultimately trying to accomplish. Further, these differing views may never be surfaced in open conversation, leading to people talking past each other a lot.
* Incentives: Related to a shared view of success is the issue of incentive. Many private company board members are shareholders and have a clear financial incentive to make the company successful. I won't go so far as to say this creates accountability, but it does serve as a clear motivator to be engaged. Non-profit directors have nothing at stake that creates an incentive for engagement. If anything the incentive may be a friendship with other directors or the ED, in which case, the incentive is to maintain the relationship with that person rather than do what is best for the org (a common cause of dysfunction). This is a particularly acute problem when it comes to the most important issue a board can face: when and whether to replace a CEO. Most non-profit board members have no incentive, or a negative incentive, to engage in such a difficult conversation.
* Size: Non-profit boards are often very large (10+ people), while private company boards are usually 5-7 people. Size makes everything harder, and leads to fewer meetings, less discussion, and less engagement.
* Skill sets: Non-profit directors are often recruited with the primary goal of fundraising. They often have little to no board experience and may not have any experience with governance of an organization of any size in either a director or executive capacity. In my experience, even the ability to read simple financial statements is rare, much less the ability to think strategically about where to take an organization or how to scale it.
Whether profit or non-profit, I think it's important that the voard represents the stakeholders of the organisation. And for a for-profit company that means not just the shareholders, but also the employees, the customers, and any other societal interests. For a non-profit, that probaboy means the donors, the employees and people representing whatever problem the organisation is addressing.
Random celebrities with no clear stake or responsibility sounds like a bad idea.
Reminds me of Twitter's board where they have a small ownership stake (in % and $ terms).
I've seen a few non-profit boards in action and they're filled with a couple people who really care about the cause, and the rest really care about their egos and like the title of board member.
While this is likely the case for for-profit boards, but having skin in the game really matters for engagement and motivation. Try watching a sports game with money on the line and another without. The difference is huge.
> Try to articulate what's so weird about nonprofit boards, fundamentally. I think a lot of it is the combination of great power, unclear responsibility, and ~zero accountability; additionally, I haven't been able to find much in the way of clear, widely accepted statements of what makes a good board member.
This can be by design if what's in the TV show Ozark reflects the reality. Powerful people need a charade to exert their influence while avoid accountability.
Most of this article could apply to for-profit boards as well. Some of the key points here (e.g., lack of clear responsibilities) come from immature governance, rather than any particular difference in org. type. It's easier to join a nonprofit board than a for-profit board, so you get less-experienced people (and leadership!). And nonprofit boards often come with a) fundraising responsibility and b) networking opportunity, so it can be a different kind of gig.
The Carver Method of Board Governance is one of the best I've found. I"ve implemented it successfully and seen great results with actually focusing a non-profit boadrd. The Board's primary responsibility is not fund raising, not organazation managment - but governance.....
Not weird, different. Its the publicly owned companies which are weird IMO. Schizophrenic when it comes to things like responsibility, public interest, egocentric-ism, short term PoV/profit, and so on and so forth.
An opportunity for me to not hijack the conversation! You brought up for-profit boards! OK, a pet peeve.
They don't seem to suffer any consequences, and yet they really should. Let's look at Yahoo [1]. This is not just a story of Yahoo losing a technology race. It's a story of an incompetent board. The race was already over in 2008:
> Yahoo had a chance to sell for $44.6 billion in early 2008, when Microsoft made an unsolicited offer.
They turned it down. 8 years later:
> Today, Verizon said it is buying Yahoo’s core businesses for $4.83 billion.
So, instead of taking 44 billion when it was offered, they ran it down to less than 5.
Comparing Microsoft's offer to Verizon's is a smidge unfair, because Verizon didn't buy the whole shebang. I'm having trouble figuring out the numbers, but the Yahoo Japan and Alibaba holdings were worth several billion and proceeds from their sales were distributed to shareholders.
Of course, I'm personally sad Microsoft didn't buy Yahoo, because I was sure I'd get a free Xbox if they did. OTOH, I think Microsoft would have been a poor host for Yahoo, and there were a few more good years left. Of course, the Microsoft searh deal went rather poorly. I left in October 2011, for many reasons, but not selling out to Microsoft wasn't one.
> If a for profit compaby goes belly up, do the board members suffer any real consequences, apart from perhaps not being invited into other boards?
Funniest shit I've heard all week. Once you get above a certain level (C-suite or board level), you only get in trouble in very specific circumstances. Most of the time on for profit boards you get paid to sit on your ass and meet in emergencies or annually or quarterly.
Another example, harder to pin down, is Hewlett-Packard from pre-Fiorina on. Since they're now three different companies, it would be an exercise to compute valuations (anyone?), but for me the real loss is the HP culture, or "the HP Way" if you will.
HP used to be a proud, if boring, company, the flagship of the Valley. Their people were great to work with. They were ethical. You could spend your whole career there and many people did.
Then they had Fiorina, the diva and drama queen, and then Mark Hurd and more mergers and would-be mergers than you can shake a stick at. There was a public shareholders' meeting at Flint Center because interest was so high. Where was the Board in all this?
The boards for small nonprofts vs large nonprofits are very different.
Getting on a board in the small-nonprofit world is all about sufficient interest, dedication, and somewhat on a willingness to give. In my experience, most small-to-midsize nonprofits are willing to take about anyone who demonstrates dedication to both the cause and organization in the form of sufficient volunteer time and willingness to do what is needed to advance the cause. The people running the show get to know you, and eventually invite you in.
But getting on a board in the for-profit world is all about who you know and the contacts you bring. In a lot of ways this is very similar to the large, well-funded, well-staffed non-profits, where they don't really want your expertise, but do want your money and your contact list.
As far as consequences if things fail: your donors will likely hate you.
If the money is being spent to drive the mission of the non-profit successfully no one cares. We show up for the board meeting, order sandwiches, and ask questions. And plan the next meeting.
If the money is not being spent effectively or the mission isn't being met well we ask questions, sometimes offer advice, or raise more money. Maybe staff need to be changed or a new director hired. The board does not need to know the technicalities of the non-profit it just wants it to be governed with good care.
You can't operate a non-profit the same technique as a for-profit. They are orthogonal in duties. A true non-profit has to spend almost every dollar it takes in. The board is all voluntary and there is nothing in it for them, except those sandwiches!