Got Game? If Not, You Need It

A very warm welcome to guest blogger, Laura Gassner Otting, President and Founder of Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group.  Laura wrote this on the the red eye to Boston, MA from San Francisco, CA following attending and presentating at the National Conference for Service and Volunteerism. 

En route home from the National Conference on Service and Volunteerism, an amazing and inspiring event for more than 5,000 true believers, I can't help but reflect with some awe about the polish and promise that the service sector has once again embraced.  It is thrilling, after more than a decade away, to see it in action, and exciting to absorb the energy as the harbinger of things to come.  Yet, more than anything else, the people themselves stood out for their individual dedication and their collective promise. 

Everyone, but everyone, seemed to be walking around with a plan:  a plan to change the world, a plan to raise more money, a plan to serve more communities, a plan to leapfrog into a new career.  As an executive recruiter walking the halls, you might imagine I got a fair number of leapfrogging plans in stereo.  Some were impressive:  well formed, cogent, crisp, logical.  Others were based on limited, on-the-fly, seat-of-the-pants thinking (or not, as the case may be). 

So, what's your plan?

It's not enough simply to show up, expecting your charm and fast talk to win the day.  You need game.

Game is that all-encompassing vision of the world the way you'd like it to be.  Game is knowing the individual levers you'd like to pull and which tools in your tool box will enable your success.  Game is the boldness to see possibility in a leap of faith sector switch.  Game is strategically disaggregating your for-profit experiences into viable nonprofit buckets and honing your pitch time and time again.  Game is that surgical strike you make in the halls of a conference between workshops, seizing the moment to impact the most favorable impression on your target market.  Game is the confidence with which you bear your soul and recruit true champions to your cause: in this case, you.

Over the past few days of this conference, one could practically float into tomorrow on the promise of community change to come.  And yet, the sector is realistic about the immense challenges that stand before it.  Now more than ever, it needs smart thinkers who can solve big problems.  It needs new thinkers who are respectful of the wisdom of those who came before.  It needs energetic soul bearers who know where enthusiasm meets its limits and real skills take over.  It needs game, and it needs you.