Guest Blogger: Dr. Alex Klein
Senior Manager, North American Supply Chain Solutions, APL Logistics
As an educator and as a College Board member and recent past Chairman, I recognize the value of higher education and cherish the ability to participate in academia at various levels. As a manager of people in a global supply chain management organization working with some of the top global manufacturers and retailers, I also recognize the value of credentials and a solid core knowledge base. When I enrolled in Temple’s DBA program, my immediate goal was to raise the level of my participation and qualification in these endeavors supported by an advanced degree and the education I expected Temple University to provide. I did not expect that the advanced degree would create upward mobility in my current company, but I clearly expected the doctoral degree to add a level of confidence and rigorous structure I would learn to use in my leadership, which it undoubtedly did.
For nearly 20 years, I have pursued involvement in academia through board involvement at Harcum College just outside of Philadelphia, through serving as an adjunct professor at Dunlap Stone University in Phoenix, and through information sharing at the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, along with certificate courses at MIT and Stanford. I was certain that the advanced education would bring me current and provide me with new tools and more structured approaches that would enable my effectiveness with respect to my research, teaching, and writing.
For my research topic, I chose to focus on nonprofit board effectiveness. As a long-time member of nonprofit civic, religious, and educational boards, and having served as an at-large member, committee chair, secretary, and board chairperson, I have begun to develop intuitions and questions about how board structure and engagement affect an organization’s performance. After serving on several dysfunctional nonprofit boards that, in my opinion, have ill-served their purpose and brought little value to the majority of the members or the organizations they served, I landed on a board that has reversed my perception of these volunteer efforts. Before my time on this highly functional board, I had concluded that many (not all) board members were often more interested in developing their personal brands than in furthering an organization’s mission or supporting their board colleagues; that board composition had no coherent theme; that it was the norm for meetings to be highly and even irrationally contentious and mired in age-old discussions without resolution; and that organizations governed by such boards neither grew nor developed but carried on due to inertia. In my role as chair of the board of trustees of Harcum college, I have developed an appreciation for how engagement and focus enhance board functioning – and I have begun to wonder whether more engaged and focused boards might improve a sense of belonging or accomplishment for board members while, at the same time, meeting the mission and improving the financial performance of an organization.
So in the end (or maybe the beginning of the next chapter), Temple University’s DBA program provided me with direction and resources that would help me answer some of my questions about nonprofit board management, making me a better leader in that arena while also instilling a sense of rigor and providing me with tools and structure to complete efforts in my day-to-day work, like as a manager in the for profit world.
