[ska]

I've tried, but I can't see what you believe you have falsified here, can you elaborate?

There are certainly issues with inefficiency in charities stemming from the fact they don't have the same market pressures on them as private sector companies do (or at least, not as much). However, this doesn't have anything to do with the difficultly of managing complexity in large organizations.

Or were you objecting to the hand-waving about efficiency? I agree measuring impact of charities are difficult but what else would you look at? Executive pay rate is obviously a silly one without extra context. Year-over-year changes are good, but I at least alluded to that.

I guess I don't know quite what you are objecting to.

While it is true for the reasons you mention that a badly managed charity may last much longer than a badly managed company, that has no impact at all on my statement. It is not somehow easier to manage the charity, it is just less immediate that the negative consequences impact you.

But note, I'm not suggesting we support badly managed charities. I'm saying that to manage it well requires similar skill to that of a similarly scaled private sector company, and you will have to pay for those skills.

This is entirely separable from the issue of evaluating whether or not it is being effectively managed.

[Retric]

I object to the assumption that equivalent sized organizations are equally difficult to run.

Compare the rate of companies that existed 5 or 50 years ago and don’t exist now vs the rate of midsized or larger charities that existed 5 or 50 years ago and don’t exist today. If they where equal you could argue running them was equally difficult. However, because utter failure is not equally likely clearly it’s not equally difficult.

You can use other metrics like the rate CEO’s are replaced and they also show it’s just a much easier job.

So, if the org is more likely to survive and you’re not as likely to be fired that’s clearly an obvious threshold for success at the job. Unless you’re going to suggest only more capable people run charities or something.

PS: I then tried to suggest why this was the case, but that’s not central to the argument.

[ska]

I don't think they are exactly equivalent. It's certainly not true that all 1000 person orgs are equally difficult to run (regardless of sector). I didn't claim that.

However, I do think there is an aspect of complexity that is inherent in scaling and reach which is just unavoidable. If you operate in multiple countries/jurisdictions. If you have multiple locations & plants. If you have distinct branches with different goals. If you operate in multiple languages. etc. etc. These things are inherent complexities, and as you get bigger, they are harder to manage well.

I see what you are getting at, but I don't think failure rate is a particularly useful comparison, for two reasons. (1) (as noted before) charities can survive mismanagement for longer, typically. (2) Lots of organizations have a sort of "useful lifetime", not everything is going to become a multigenerational organization, and that's fine. I would argue that due to types of mission, charities skew longer here (e.g. the work is often unlikely to ever go away) than corporations.

Fundamentally what I was objecting to was the idea that charities are somehow inherently easy to run, so they should do fine with people who either aren't skilled or are incredibly self-sacrificing (you'll mostly find the former). That's just crazy to me.

So I don't think anything you've brought up invalidates what I said; it just points out an orthogonal problem - that it is harder to evaluate "good management" in the context of charities. Not that it wasn't already hard to evaluate.