Managing the Social Sector

The Social Sector works on some of the most complex issues facing humanity today (Education, Health, Poverty, Hunger, Climate Change, Equality etc.). The quality of work done and thereby the social change delivered depends disproportionately on the quality of professional minds at work.

While we have seen the transformative power of professional leadership and management as a force for strategic success in business, the social sector has forever given a lot more importance to the development of technical, policy related, research talent to the exclusion/neglect of professional management and leadership. The fundamental missing link for change in the world today is the ability to envision, design and deliver sustainable, systemic socio-economic-ecological impact at scale in timelines which are able to outpace the problems.

To make this a reality, we need to build the domain and a cadre of Development Management professionals. Possibly, with an imagination of management which dips into the established management literature / practice and evolve a more contextual, holistic, brand of management relevant to socio-economic-ecological change at scale.

This will require building on the whole ecosystem of ideas, individuals and institutions for Development Management. Leveraging the collective wisdom of diverse groups across the world and creating institutional processes for codifying and disseminating the knowledge.