REACTION FROM A FAN: NGO SURVIVAL KIT

Here is what one reader of my eBook- NGOs Survival Kit commented about the book:-

If you have not yet downloaded the eBook, CLICK HERE

"I hate to see you thinking that NGOs are a solution to anything other than a bandaid that falls off in time to show the same wound underneath.  

They are a very stupid idea as I described earlier. They do not produce true employment as they do not produce anything!  What they attempt to do is to alleviate suffering by throwing money at it. 

I for one would love to see NGOs die I don't want NGOs to compete with private business, nor do I want government to compete with private business, because only the marketplace can most efficiently allocate resources; only the profit motive can make a project self-sustaining.  This is history.

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The problem with NGOs is the Boards.  Believe me, I have several NGOs as clients and have friends on Boards and friends who work as Directors under Boards, so I have seen lots of NGOs. 

You take the profit motive out of an enterprise and you get a non-business enterprise whose business and skill is to beg for money from other sources, not to manufacture its own.  And you are never going to have a profit motive with a Board because profit motive is an individual-driven quest, not the result of committee work.  It’s the lack of a profit motive that makes them fail.  And why do successful business people strive to make a profit? – because they can’t beg for a living; they actually have to produce something. Production, production, production – therein lies success.

NGOs and their Boards are set up to mimic large successful publically traded companies – operations with a Board.  The problem is that you can’t succeed by copying a model; you have to build it from its base.  Henry Ford invented an automobile, THEN he got a big company with a Board.  The Board comes AFTER a commercial success, not before.  The problem with NGOs is that they first build a Board and then everyone on it fights for turf. 

In a successful commercial enterprise you can actually pick your Board (if it ever should become necessary) and put other successful business people on it, not a bunch of incompetent meddlers who just like to tell their friends that they are on a Board. 

In the for profit world multi member Boards are only necessary when the company wants to issue public stock, otherwise a Board is usually composed of one person – the owner of the business and maybe a spouse or parent.  I know some pretty successful companies that would never go public because the owner would no longer be in charge. 

Innovation and enterprising whether or not you put the word “social” in front of enterprise or not, are outputs of extraordinary individuals who are able to build the right structure to carry out production of a good idea/product. 

BTW, “Social enterprise” is a nasty buzz word.  It makes it seem as though only NGOs can do social enterprising. 

Enterprising IS social and any attempt by NGOs to try to co-opt the term is fraud. 

Now that I have finished reading the rest of your ebook I find your 14 points excellent and useful.

For what it’s worth,

Johnie Blog's Fan".