John Wooden, the legendary coach of UCLA basketball, told his players on the first day of practice each year: “you can either discipline yourself, or someone else will.”

Every success rests on mutual accountability. There are no exceptions of which I am aware.

After forty years of work, I have developed one primary talent: Marketing.

The voice for creating better measurements continues to grow in the non-profit world. And that’s certainly a good thing. But my experience in business says much depends on what, and how much, you measure.

I’ve written before about my favorite leadership book “On Becoming a Leader” by John Bennis because his primary point in the book is that we are always “becoming” leaders. The same holds true for focusing the foundation I began in 1997. We like to say that we are “twice as good as we were last year but only half as good as we could be next year.” Our first iteration was “serving the poor.” We formed an outreach center, stumbled into a near-downtown Cleveland neighborhood and started our work… rather clumsily, I might add. A few years into it we realized that Northeast Ohio had over 2,500 non-profit organizations. That told us we’d do better to help make existing organizations better instead of building another very average one.

My experience says there are several reasons that business partnerships are like marriages:

Author’s Note: These short stories wind up a 12-part series exploring the lessons I’ve learned in building a foundation. I realized in writing these twelve articles that I’m not embarrassed by the mistakes I’ve made; perhaps I’m even proud of them. They have been my tuition for learning.

Author’s Note:  This is the first of the last two installments of my 12 month/article journey through “lessons from building a foundation”.  I promised last month that the last two articles of this series would be a compilation of short stories and lessons attached to each so, here goes:

Author’s Note: This is the 10th in a series of 12 articles about the mistakes we’ve made building our foundation since 1997. I’ve decided the last two articles will be a specific timeline of who we’ve connected with and what we learned specifically in our primary growth years – 2007 to the present. I hope you enjoy these articles. Feel free to contact me at any time.