Supplement to case SM104. In September 2015, Executive Director Cynthia Rider and Artistic Director Bill Rauch submitted the 2015-2025 OSF Long Range Plan to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival board. With the festival leadership finally in place and stable, they collectively created their first strategic plan, and the company headed into its 81st season with an 82-page guiding document. Throughout his first eight years, Bill Rauch had remained notable for his vision and drive for the company to grow and change. The theater's national profile developed substantially, making it "something of a mecca for the theater arts." Major programming and capital expansions occurred, as did unforeseen challenges such as an increase in nearby forest fires and a successful unionization attempt. As Rider and Rauch looked to build on their successes and handle these challenges, they developed a new kind of strategic plan. More concise, external facing, and focused on vision than previous plans, the new document sought to push the company into an ambitious future. Whether the new plan has stretched OSF far enough, or perhaps too far, remains to be seen.
This case describes the formation and operation of Leopard Capital, a "Frontier Market Private Equity Fund" from its establishment in 2007 up through the end of 2012. The case focuses on the fund's founder, Douglas Clayton, and his history doing business in Asia and what led him to the decision to start Leopard Capital as a Cambodia- focused private equity fund, and later to expand into other frontier markets such as Mynmar, Mongolia, and Haiti. The case emphasizes the fundraising challenges Clayton faced as a first-time fund manager operating in a developing country, and some of the creative strategies Leopard employed in order to attract capital from investors. The case also overviews the economic and political history of Cambodia.
Since its founding in 1980, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public had supported the work of over 3,000 of the world's most visionary social entrepreneurs; men and women who, in Ashoka founder Bill Drayton's words, are tireless pioneers of "system-changing solutions that advance the world's most urgent social problems." Through these efforts, Ashoka was also widely credited with building the larger field of social entrepreneurship. And yet, just at the moment when Ashoka's dynamism had propelled social entrepreneurship into the mainstream, Drayton and his colleagues embraced an even more expansive view of social change. According to this new vision, everyone in society, not only the most path-breaking social entrepreneurs, could and should be "changemakers" (the EACH vision). Drayton believed that this shift was such a "fundamental change, that it affects everything;" the revolution went far beyond Ashoka, to include not only the basic architecture of organizations -a move from walled hierarchies to teams of teams- but also the generative sources of knowledge and information which could be open sourced and widely shared. This case traces the evolution of Ashoka's mission and vision for social change, and the programmatic and organizational changes required to accommodate the EACH worldview.
Daniel Lurie headed down Highway 101 in June 2009 to investigate a potential grantee in East Palo Alto, California. As he drove, he reflected on the progress that the nonprofit organization he founded, Tipping Point Community (Tipping Point), had made in just four years of fighting to reduce poverty in the local community. It had raised a total of more than $14 million for recipient organizations, including $3 million from its main donor event in April 2009, and its profile was gaining increasing recognition in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was thinking about Tipping Point's most recent board meeting, where the board members were more relentless than ever regarding the organization's strategy and results, particularly in the areas of performance measurement, sustainability, and key funding. Tipping Point had a tremendous amount of room for improvement and growth. It was difficult to quantify its impact on the target community, which―despite Tipping Point's efforts―was struggling with homelessness, children in need of medical assistance, and limited mobility. With 600,000 people living in poverty in the Bay Area, Tipping Point's goals would not easily be met.
Acumen Fund was founded in 2001 to provide modest amounts of capital, together with business expertise, to help build thriving enterprises that would serve large numbers of poor people. In 2004, Acumen Fund invested in the Series B round of WaterHealth International (WHI), a company that was developing approaches for providing clean water to the poor worldwide. In 2006, WHI planned to launch a major initiative in India. It also planned a new round of fundraising to support the company's continued growth. Provides background information on venture philanthropy, and on Acumen Fund. Also describes the problems associated with safe drinking water in developing countries, and WHI's approach to addressing those problems.
Founded in 1980 by Bill Drayton, Ashoka was a professional organization that identified and invested in leading social entrepreneurs globally. Analogous to a venture capital firm for social start-ups, Ashoka found and supported outstanding individuals with ideas for far-reaching social change by electing them to a fellowship of social entrepreneurs. As defined by Ashoka, the social entrepreneur had the same makeup as a business entrepreneur--in mental attitude, vision, bias for action, and skills--but the social entrepreneur sought to better the world in some way. Until 1997, Ashoka focused solely on locating and supporting social entrepreneurs in developing countries. Over the next three years, however, Ashoka entered a new stage, requiring it to shed its trappings as a "global development organization." Ashoka updated its mission to address the demands of a rapidly expanding citizen sector and its more than 1,500 leading social entrepreneurs. Because Ashoka's new mission required a kind of risk-taking and willingness to "make things happen in a bigger way," Ashoka made a commitment to hire only social entrepreneurs for its key functions. The new mission and hiring commitment attracted leading business entrepreneurs to Ashoka for the first time, triggering unprecedented organizational growth and allowing Ashoka to open for business in the U.S. Addresses the challenges facing Ashoka in the U.S.
Paul Nicholson, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) Executive Director, announced that he would retire at the end of the 2012 season, after a 32-year tenure at OSF. His successor, only the third in 77 years of existence, would take over during the final year of the 2009-2013 Long Range Plan, creating great uncertainty as well as great opportunity. OSF is an arts organization that defies trends. It achieves high artistic quality, attendance, and financial stability, despite presenting challenging, classical material 280 miles from the nearest urban center. However, it is also a company whose core strengths-rotating repertory, longevity in staff-can also work against innovation. To determine focus, OSF goes through a strategic planning process every five years, often bringing about large-scale change. This case describes the planning process for the 2009-13 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Long Range Plan. It explores challenges around innovation and leadership transitions that the executive team faced, and how OSF moved forward despite a strategic plan that was lacking. As the final year of the plan approaches, OSF must determine what it wants in and hire a new Executive Director, a major milestone for the organization, while simultaneously designing the next long range plan.
The San Francisco Symphony (SFS) is a major U.S. orchestra that took on ancillary activities as part of its mission to bring the best in music to the Bay Area. Despite increasing costs, SFS posted surpluses for 15 consecutive years. However, by the end of 1993, SFS faced a shift in its financial fortunes: forecasts indicated annual budget shortfalls of $25 million in total deficits by the end of the 1999-2000 season. In 1994, SFS had just signed a "superstar" music director to lead SFS into the 21st century whose ambitions for the orchestra were boundless. Students will step into the role of an executive committee member attending a strategy retreat to develop a strategy for SFS that balances its financial needs and its artistic commitments and aspirations. Key issues for a financial plan and supporting operations are: 1) relationships with orchestra musicians and their union contract, 2) buyers' capacity for accepting continued increases in ticket prices, 3) the likelihood of substantial increases in annual contributions, 4) local responses to changes in the orchestra's community activities, and 5) the new music director's expectations for support of his artistic aspirations.