Wolf's Uncertainty Principle

You Must Choose That Which You Do Not Know

- steve wolf (March 16th, 2008)

Heisenberg may have come up with the more scientifically enlightening uncertainty principle, but the one above is certainly weighing more heavily on my mind today.

My networking efforts to date are definitely helping-- they are pointing out the need for me to get more focused on what I specifically can bring to the not-for-profit party.

A friend of a friend who works at USAid wrote that, "recruitment in this community is demand-driven. (Steve) may be a person of great merit with lots of experience, but my guess is he can’t supply-drive the hiring process."

In other words, I can't just expect that people will be so blown away by my experience that they'll fall over backwards to offer me some sort of dream opportunity in their organization. At the same time, I got some comforting news that my entrepreneurial experience is likely to be considered a valuable skill in the not-for-profit world. Why? Fund-raising. There is an expectation that fund-raising is likely to be part of almost any not-for-profit role so the ability to help sell the plan behind my business will be viewed positively. Apparently, the Gates Foundation takes a consistently positive view of entrepreneurial experience.

But the overall challenge to get more focused is a bit disconcerting for me. Its the classic uncertainty problem. I need to make a decision about where to focus but I lack sufficient information about the organizations and opportunities to do so with any confidence.  Choose that which you do not know...

My strategy has been to delay the decision to gather more information but that won't be an appropriate strategy for much longer. Essentially, I believe I need to step up the efforts to circulate more directly within the target organizations of interest. The truth of it is that I still don't even have a bona-fide short list of target organizations, but I keep thinking that places like the World Bank or the Gates Foundation have got be somewhere high on that list (once it gets officially developed). Getting some informational interviews in those types of organizations will help clarify things for me I'm sure.

New resources that popped up through contacts this week include:

The Careers section of Philanthropy.com (the not-for-profit online newspaper) and another site called Guidestar. The Guidestar site provides overviews of charitable organizations and also provides budgets and some salary information. This could be really helpful in terms of sorting through organizations and getting to that bona-fide short list of places to actively target.