Business wasn't always the way. The current place of corporate leaders as the chief models for professional success in the eyes of college graduates (especially those from prestigious institutions) has not been a permanent fact of American society, but rather has developed over the last several decades. Even as recently as the 1950's people would sort of look at you funny when you told them you were going to go to business school. McKinsey visionary Marvin Bower is the perfect example. In Elizabeth Edersheim's biography of Bower, he talks about leaving the law firm Jones, Day, Reavis, & Pogue to go to the Harvard Business School, and everyone telling him he was throwing his career down the tubes. In reality, the ascendance of business success as the ultimate personal achievement in America probably started around the time of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and other great industrialists, but the point is that prestige has not always been associated with business. All one needs to do to understand alternative ways in which talented leaders have thought about personal success is look back to the heroes of the late 19th/early 20th centuries: Holmes, Darwin, James -- intellects, academics, practitioners. Promising students graduating from elite academic institutions aimed to be like these guys, not like the businessmen of their day.

But right now, I do believe success in business is the expectation placed upon graduates with exceptional academic credentials. This belief stems largely from personal experience, but also from a brief and unscientific survey of various alumni lists and University Career Services websites. Further, I believe that it is expectations -- and the subsequent lauding of 'achievements' in the field of business -- that send most students down this career path, rather than a burning desire for personal financial gain.

If we want to drive social change through the nonprofit sector over the coming decades, we must address this circumstance of society. We must show them that success in and dedication to work on issues of great social value is every bit as important as success in and dedication to work on issues of great economic value. We must show them that creating social value demands the same quantitative work, intellectual horsepower and organizational skill that today's most successful for-profit endeavors demand. And we must show them that challenges and rewards of working across communities here in America are every bit as profound as working across international borders. In short, we must consider nonprofit work an "achievement" by the standards of any other avocation. Nonprofit work is not charity; it is not service; and it is not simple alms-giving. It is a profession.

This does not, by any means, require that we bring "business values" to the social sector. Recently, management guru Jim Collins' published a socially-directed monograph based on his best-selling Good to Great. In that book, he says flat-out, "We must reject the idea -- well-intentioned, but dead wrong -- that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become 'more like a business.' Most businesses -- like most of anything else in life -- fall somewhere between mediocre and good."

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