Missing the Mission | The Importance of Detail-Oriented Management
One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit that sees its inexpensive XO notebook as a tool to spur education in developing countries, is having trouble getting out of its own way. In the same week OLPC won the Brit Insurance Design Award, it was revealed that the organization lost its well-regarded director of security architecture, who said in resigning that he could not "subscribe to [its] new aims or structure in good faith, [or] … reconcile them with my personal ethic."
OLPC’s aim is noble, but having lost corporate partner Intel in a public split, struggled to find even adequate leadership, and wrestled unsuccessfully with getting its effort off the ground, it is in danger of buckling under the weight of its own good intentions. The organization’s chairman, Nicholas Negroponte, told BusinessWeek earlier this month that he was finally searching for a chief executive — three years after OLPC was launched.
The search for a CEO began last year, but the intensity ratcheted up in recent weeks. "I am not a CEO," says Negroponte. "Management, administration, and details are my weaknesses. I’m much better at the vision, big-picture side of the house." The difficulty in finding the right person is that most of the candidates come from the PC industry, but Negroponte is looking for somebody with the leadership profile similar to that of Kofi Annan, the former secretary-general of the UN, who would "view the world as a mission, not a market."
The XO laptop turned out to be more expensive than OLPC had anticipated, and several of the countries it had marketed to have dialed back their orders. It’s good that Negroponte recognizes the need to find a detail person instead of a visionary, but if he’s focused too much on finding the next Kofi Annan, One Laptop Per Child could be in even greater trouble than it already is. Sometimes the mission is in the details.
"Missing the Mission" appears Tuesdays at the 501(c) Files. | 501(c)
Tags: One Laptop Per Child, Nicholas Negroponte
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POSTED IN: Education, Management, Mission, Technology
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