Daniel O’Neil

thoughts and reflections

  • FAQs

    1. Why is your blog called, “Your Next Executive Director?”

    I’m looking for my next challenge and want to run a dynamic, growing organization. I began this blog to learn how to blog. I’ve rambled through a variety of different subjects as I learned about writing and sharing. I applied these lessons to my organizations blog: www.ourborder.org. Now that I am looking for a new challenge, I decided to use this blog to market myself.

    2. You’ve never been an Executive Director. What makes you think you would be an effective one?

    I’ve run projects and country offices for over twenty years, frequently with no in-country supervision. I have been responsible for developing the country strategy, cultivating donors, supervising the offices finances, and hiring and firing all staff. Additionally, I work closely with the two PADF Board Members that live in the Dominican Republic.

    3. What are your greatest strengths?

    • Managing a Vision and Strategy: A central part of my management style is to focus on developing and managing a compelling vision and strategy for the organizations that I direct. I believe that an organization’s vision is its soul and its story is its lifeblood. I work closely with my staff and our partners to develop and fine tune our vision and story. We regularly review and revise the strategy based on changing conditions.As an example, my current program began with the goal of strengthening the capacity of the local producer groups in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands. We have grown from that modest goal to become the reference organization for all binational work on the island. We now work at every level–from the coffee growers in the borderlands to the heads of both governments. In our effort to expand our impact, we recently started a trilingual blog (www.ourborder.org) and have begun building broader international support for our work.
    • Managing People: An organization is only as good as its people and I am very good at bringing out the best in my team. I work closely with staff members to coach them as needed while also delegating responsibility to give them the authority that they need to be able to work effectively. I have had very low staff turnover.
    • Managing Operations: The best teams can only succeed if they have a good plan.I have directed a wide variety of operations all over the world. I am very good at developing detailed plans, tracking progress and budgets, and completing projects on time and on budget. 
    • Managing Resources: Just as an army marches on its stomach, an organization lives and dies based on its resource management.I run a tight ship wherein everyone knows the rules. This allows me to run a lean operation and still keep the finances clean. In over twenty years of running operations, including some in war zones, I’ve never had a disallowed cost or run over budget.

    4. We view our Executive Director as the “Chief Fund-Raiser.” What experience do you have in raising funds?

    I have helped to develop scores of proposal both in response to calls for proposals and as unsolicited proposals. I am very good at developing project ideas and overseeing the development of complex proposals. Beginning three years ago, we began actively cultivating institutional donors in an effort to continue our ongoing border work. We have raised over two million dollars and are PADF’s only country office that operates solely with institutional donations. Recently we developed an active website and have begun soliciting private donations.

    I have been the spokesperson for all of my projects. In this role, I frequently communicate with our partners, the press, and the national governments. I have been fortunate in recent years that we have received significant high level attention for our work on the Haitian-Dominican border so that I have met several times with the President of the Dominican Republic and the Presidents of both the Haitian and Dominican Senate. I am also a very good public speaker and have given numerous speeches in English, French, and Spanish.

    5. We have a position that would be perfect for you, but the title is not “Executive Director.” Would you be interested?

    It depends. I am very good at running operations and at managing staff. I prefer to work with little direct supervision (tell me what you want done and let me do it). If you have an opening that plays to my strengths, then I am interested!

    6. What would make a position a bad fit for you? 

    Don’t hire me if you know exactly what you want me to do. If your organization is doing fine and you want to stay the course or if you want to manage my day-to-day operations, then you don’t need me. However, if you have a problem that needs to be solved or are unsure of how to reach your goal, then maybe I can help you find that solution.

    7. Would you be interested in working for a for-profit company?

    Yes, if I believe in your mission. I’m actually a civil engineer by training. I’ve worked for a number of for-profit engineering and construction companies. I would be just as happy to sell a remarkable product as to market a remarkable program. 

    8. I’m interested. How can I learn more about your experience or contact you?

    You can see a short version of my resume here. There is more information on my linkedin profile. You can reach me through email at danieloneil at oneilfamily.org (formatted as an email) or call me on my cellphone at 809 224-8307. I look forward to hearing from you!

  • Does the Harlem Children’s Zone hold the key to revolutionalizing the world?

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    My kids class

    I recently reread Jared Diamond's excellent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is an excellent overview of how a variety of factors gave some geographic regions the natural advantages that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. He beautifully shows that, up until fairly recently, where you were born, rather than your lineage or "race" determines how rich your society would be. However, now that the world is flat and everyone has access to the same guns, germs, and steel; why have the differences continued? Why aren't African kids competing on par with European kids?

    The question became even more intriguing after I read Malcom Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He looks at successful people from Mozart to Bill Gates and concludes that these people became so successful by spending the 10,000 hours required to master a skill and then being in the right time and place to take advantage of the mastery. This was the case with Bill Gates who, as a high school student, had nearly unlimited access to a mainframe computer when few computer professors did. It was also the case of Mozart, the son of a composer, who was forced to put in his ten thousand hours while still a young child. 

    The beauty of putting together the thoughts outlined in these two books is that they make the case that anyone in the world could succeed if they put in the time to master the skill. Except it doesn't work that way. With a few rare exceptions, Africa does not produce many "Outliers."

    The best answer that I have found lies in the story behind the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ). As described in the This American Life episode, the HCZ CEO, Geoffrey Canada, was raising his second family in the 1990s are realized that the thinking about childrearing had dramatically changed from his first try at it. The new thinking was that parents had to be involved with their kids from even before the kids was born–eating the right foods, singing to the womb. Once the baby was born, there was a whole new philosophy of discipline and care. He encouraged his social workers to go out into their neighborhoods so see if this new thinking had caught on in Harlem. They found that it had not. Geoffrey then reworked the HCZ strategy to focus on helping the children by creating a "conveyor belt" to take them (and their parents) from baby college to college. The HCZ helps parents to care for their kids and prepare their kids for success. By not waiting until the children are reach the traditional school age, they are able to impact the children when they are easiest to touch.

    The results that the HCZ has achieved are nothing short of amazing. They have transformed the neighborhood from one of underachieving kids to overachieving ones. They are proving that it is possible to transform education. The Obama administration is looking to duplicate the success through "Promise Neighborhoods."

    What if we could take this idea global? What if we could launch baby colleges and develop conveyor belts to take kids to college? Could this be the missing key that would allow children from poor families from all over the world to finally be able to compete in this global economy? Is the biggest mistake that we make in education that we wait too long to begin educating our kids and thereby deny them the chance to achieve mastery?

  • Seth’s mad at the “non-profits” and the situation is worse than he thinks

    Seth wrote a strong post today highlighting how non-profits are
    failing to embrace the new social media technologies that seem perfectly designed to help them to fullfill their missions. He says that we should be agents of
    change and yet we fear it. His post was so painfully true that I
    almost couldn't finish reading it. From what I have seen in
    international development, we don't just fear new technology, we fear
    all change.

    I started blogging as a way of joining in the discussion of how to improve international development projects. I have been working internationally for over twenty years and have become disenchanted with the lack of progress. One of my first posts
    was on how non-profits do not foster learning. I later wrote on the new challenges in the development business and the failure of USAID's
    excellent online document depository to foster learning.

    I've never figured out why we don't do better to foster organizational learning and change and am ashamed by our collective failure. Somehow non-profits have become more afraid of failure than of the
    status quo. Too often we focus on short-term goals ("number of people trained," "number of schools built," "number of farmers using new techniques" and we lose sight of our broader goals.

    The international development work that I do is full of projects that failed to have a lasting impact and yet negative evaluations are very rare. I've heard it said that the best predictor of success for a new entrepreneur is the number of businesses he or she has started–not the number that have succeeded.  In business, it is recognized that failure is probably a better learning tool than success. Yet non-profits hate to admit failure.

    What if we admitted that our approaches were risky? What if we strove to either make dramatic changes or to fail brilliantly? Our track record would not be perfect, but we would certainly be remarkable and isn't that better?

  • How much Clout do you have?

    Fareed Manjoo wrote in Slate that Tweeting a protest against a company has more success when you have more followers and are therefore perceived as having more clout. However, the number of followers is less important than who the followers are–the President's Daily Brief is written for a select audience, but one with a lot of clout.

    Seth Godin points out that the "web" knows how much "clout" we have and how much are followers have. It knows if our tweets are retweeted, if our followers have lots of followers, and which of our ideas are amplified. Each of these bits of information is hidden in a different place, but they could be aggregated together. Whether we like it or not, someone is going to figure out how to do this. 

    Are you ready to have your clout measured? Would you pay to have that information on your followers? What about your competitors?

  • A new, excellent primer on poverty

    Rahul-full;init_[1] A friend of mine, Rahul Deodhar, has just put out an excellent primer on poverty. He explains beautifully the concepts that I touched on in one of my early posts "The New Thinking on Poverty." The basic idea is that people move in and out of poverty based on what Rahul calls "Snakes" (pitfalls and bad habits that pull them down) and ladders (good habits and actions that pull them out). Rahul provides clear illustrations of how people can cycle in and out of poverty and the high cost of being poor. It's a free ebook and well worth the read. You can learn more about Rahul through his website: http://www.rahuldeodhar.com/

  • The Tragedy in Gonaives

    Patrick Ferrell of the Miami Herald won a Pulizer Prizefor his striking pictures of the terrible floods that hit Haiti last year. However, the bigger tragedy was described in an article from the New York Times last month, “Living in a Sea of Mud.” Eight months after the floods and just over a month before the start of the new hurricane season, Haiti has not finished digging out from last year’s storms.

    When the floods hit Haiti last year, a number of people asked me what happened to the millions of dollars that Haiti received after the floods in 2004. “After all the money that the international community invested, why wasn’t Gonaives better protected?” The sad truth is that there was never much money. I was part of PADF’s reconstruction team and can attest that we did the best that could be done with the small amount of money that we had. However, we only had money to patch a few problems and to try to help them return to things to their previous condition. There was almost no money to make the town safer. Imagine New Orleans if the US government had only tried to make the levees nearly as strong as they had been pre-Katrina and then walked away!

    The reconstruction following last year’s floods was even less. Although a lot of assistance was provided in the days following the floods to help people survive, almost nothing has been done to protect Gonaives. The people of Gonaives worked hard to clean up as best they could with their own tools, but they were buried under a mountain of mud. The Haitian government has no resources to protect Gonaives or to evacuate it. The people know what they have to do when the next floods come, but the best that most people can do is to climb on their neighbor’s roof and pray for help. PADF’s disaster exert, Joe Felix, says that the population of Gonaives gets scared every time it rains.

    I hope and pray that Haiti is spared in this year’s hurricane season. I don’t think I could stand to see any more pictures of Haitians struggling to survive while I know that we never gave them the tools that they needed to protect themselves.

     

  • DEC–A goldmine of information locked behind a weak website

    Toptitledec
    Several years ago, USAID created a beautiful repository for all those progress reports, lessons learned reports, and technical studies that it generates: The Development Experience Clearinghouse. From its frontpage:

    USAID's Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) is the largest online resource for USAID funded technical and program documentation, with over 62700documents available for electronic download.

    The idea of the site is wonderful–to make all of the documents that are generated by USAID and its contractors publically available. I use it frequently when I need to research a new project or country. I love that my old reports are available through the site including quite a bibliography from our Hurricane Georges Project. I love getting the weekly email with the lists of all of the new titles. The variety is quite inspiring:

    This past week's email contained around 130 titles. Sure, some of the reports are very specialized or just routine progress reports. However, there must be a lot of great information buried in this pile of reports. Unfortunately, it remains buried. I am intrequed to learn what was learned during the grassroots civic education project in Eygpt, but I fear that the report is just a routine, "we did what we promised to do" report. I don't have time to wade through 130 reports a week.

    I would love to see one of two things happen:

    1. Have the DEC website switch to a youtube format: The information page for each report would include both a counter to show how popular it is and a place to leave comments. You could easily see which reports are most popular (and in theory most interesting) for any category or country. The comments would let you know what other people thought of the report (or the project).
    2. Have a New York Times  "Review of Books" style newsletter that also comes out each week. This review could highlight the best new reports and dig out some of the buried jewels. Alternately, this could be a great subject for a blog: The USAID Report Review. Ideally, you would have reviewers from the different fields and from different geographic areas. If the review or blog attracted enough attention, it could even improve the quality of the reports themselves as people actually competed to be highlighted in the blog. 

    The options are not exclusive–the youtube-type site would make it easier to identify reports that needed a review. I doubt that USAID will take the chance of opening up the site to comments and ratings. However, what about starting a blog to review the USAID reports? Anyone intersested? 

  • International Development vs the International Development Industry

    Seth Godin has a great post today entitled "Music vs the Music Industry." His opening paragraph is as follows:

    The music industry is really focused on the ‘industry’ part and not so much on the ‘music’ part. This is the greatest moment in the history of music if your dream is to distribute as much music as possible to as many people as possible, or if your goal is to make it as easy as possible to become heard as a musician. There’s never been a time like this before. So if your focus is on music, it’s great. If your focus is on the industry part and the limos, the advances, the lawyers, polycarbonate and vinyl, it’s horrible. The shift that is happening right now is that the people who insist on keeping the world as it was are going to get more and more frustrated until they lose their jobs. People who want to invent a whole new set of rules, a new paradigm, can’t believe their good fortune and how lucky they are that the people in the industry aren’t noticing an opportunity…


    Those of us in international development face a similar paradox. This is a great time to be implementing projects overseas. National staff are far better educated and far more capable than they were twenty years ago. The world is a flatter place with more opportunities for everyone. Finally, it is much easier to connect to fellow practitioners, families, and friends (when I started working overseas twenty years ago, mail took two weeks in either direction and international phone calls were as high as $13/minute!). The combination of better people, more opportunities, and better communication makes our work much easier.

    Unfortunately for us expatriates, these trends also make us less important. When I started working overseas, most projects had several expats. Now, many international NGOs have only one fully paid expat and the national staffs run the projects. Additionally, national NGOs have become significant competitors for funding. Nationalizing the development business is a great trend, unless you are part of the international development industry and are looking to win contracts. 

    The international NGOs that are growing tend to fall into one of two categories:

    1. Hot Spot Heroes: Organizations like CHF International have grown dramatically by moving into hot spots like Iraq and Afghanistan. Others have grown by focusing on the natural disasters that seem to have hit with increasing frequency (earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis). In all of these cases, the international organizations are moving into areas where the local capacity does not yet exist or has been overwhelmed by the problems.

    2. US Retail: Some NGOs have carved niches for themselves by creating a product that sells in the US or European market. Traditional versions of this are the adopt-a-kid campaigns of Plan International, World Vision, and Save the Children. Newer versions are the internet campaigns of Globalgiving.com or Kiva. Either way, the International NGO's role is more and more just collecting funds from overseas and transferring it to a local partner.

    The organizations that focus on obtaining grants from major donors are struggling. The latest downturn in the economy has meant that not only is competition stiffer, but there is less funding available. 

    As a frontline worker in development, I feel the pinch. Why should an organization hire an expatriate like myself and incur the cost of my housing, my kids' school fees, and my salary when they could hire a local far cheaper? I am fortunate that I already have my 10,000 hours of practice in and therefore will always be needed. However, I work with a lot of interns and volunteers. They frequently ask me how to get into international development work. I tell than that I don't know anymore. The game has changed. It is a great time for international development, but a tough time for the international development industry.

  • Why I am Blogging

    I’ve spent 25 years managing projects overseas and occasionally at home in the United States. I was content to focus on my own work and my own successes.

    The January 12 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince also changed me forever. I drove into Haiti less than 24 hours after the earthquake and spent the next five months directing my organization’s response. I saw first-hand the devastation. What really hurt was the knowledge that it was not the earth’s shaking that killed over 300,000 people.  It was the bad decisions that had led to the overcrowding and poor construction that made Port-au-Prince so vulnerable that the earthquake was able to cause such damage. 

    As I reopened our office in Haiti and marshaled our team, I decided that I would no longer keep my head down and mind my own shop. Instead, I would fight for what I believed to be right and help others to stand up as well.

    The early days were the hardest. Half of our staff’s houses had been damaged. Many of our people were sleeping in cars or in tents. Despite this hardship, they came to work. We found warehouse space and quickly organized the logistics that allowed us to bring in over 50 containers of food and supplies–nearly $3 million of badly needed assistance. We organized work teams to clear the rubble, provided counseling in the camps, and began working with the government to identify which buildings were safe to use and which had to be demolished.

    I ran the Haiti office until May 12th–four months from the earthquake. I then returned to the Dominican Republic to close out that office and moved to Washington. I now support our Haiti operations from our headquarters.

    I publish these thoughts in the hopes that others working in Haiti and around the world will find the courage to fight back against inertia, to become linchpins, and to move their organizations from good to great.

  • Proud to be an American!

    I was never very comnfortable with the ending to my previous blog entry. Yes, the crisis is serious and we need to change our habits. However, my conclusin seemed to be the result of small thinking. I'm just back from listening to Obama's inaugural address. Wow! My diagnosis remains the same, but the prognosis must be different. I don't know where we are headed, but it will be much better than where we are today. I'm proud to be an American.