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The PM Podcast
Think Bigger: A Conversation with Michael Wyland, Owner/Partner at Sumption & Wyland
01:32:47
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- [00:00]
Michael Weiland
But who among you is going to participate in community life in a meaningful way to build the social capital, to build the quality of life in our community and by extension, the broader world?
- [00:13]
Jay Frost
Welcome to the PM Podcast, brought to you by Evertru, the show that takes you inside the lives of thought leaders, innovators and change makers in fundraising, philanthropy and civil society. I'm your host, Jay Frost. My guest today is Michael Weiland, nonprofit governance expert, consultant, executive coach, writer and partner in Sumption and Weiland. For more than four decades, Michael has worked across government, business, healthcare and the nonprofit sector. His career has taken him from Capitol Hill and the oil and gas industry to non profit leadership, strategic planning, board governance, executive coaching, and organizational consulting. Michael has advised more than 100 nonprofit associations and charities, worked with dozens of hospitals and healthcare organizations, and presented more than 200 workshops, seminars and keynotes. He also wrote more than 400 articles and features for the Nonprofit Quarterly, where he served previously as a consulting editor and editorial advisory board member. In this episode, we talk about Michael's path from his newspaper route to a career in nonprofit consulting, the challenges of board leadership, and what his relationships with philanthropist T. Denny Sanford and his step grandmother, Margaret Towsley, taught him about wealth, responsibility and legacy.
- [01:33]
Interviewer
We were talking right before we began about you doing this radio show. So perhaps, perhaps you have had a history of speaking your mind.
- [01:46]
Michael Weiland
Yes, absolutely. I was thinking also, one of the things I come up with from time to time is there's a Rudyard Kipling quote that the less said about our profession, the better, for we have been most things in our time and I've done a lot of different things in my life, despite the fact that I've been a consultant to Nonprofits for almost 36 years. September will be my 36th anniversary as partner in my consulting firm. But I've done a lot of things before. And accompanying that time as a consultant,
- [02:24]
Interviewer
is there a through line?
- [02:29]
Michael Weiland
To a certain extent there is. But the through line really is that I've always been curious and I've always believed that experiences are cumulative towards building wisdom, towards building context. And so I've tried not to shy away from an opportunity just because it didn't fit the predefined idea of, well, this is what my career arc is going to be or this is what I plan to do with my life. So I've done everything from I delivered newspapers when I was a kid, I worked in department stores in high school and college, I worked for a US Congressman, I was the IT person for an independent oil and gas Investor in Texas for a number of years. Then I met my now wife, then girlfriend, we started a consulting business and I become a nonprofit consultant. But while I was a nonprofit consultant, I was doing things everything from being a political volunteer and candidate to a talk show radio host to being exec of an association. So I've had a lot of different things I've done, but it's all been in the managerial leadership realm as much as possible. I worked for IBM for a while and I ended up writing the manual for my position despite the fact nobody asked me to do that. I just thought it was something that should be done.
- [04:06]
Interviewer
Well, let's, let's go back to the newspaper kid, because that usually does tell a story. And I've known other people who delivered newspapers, but not everybody does it. So was that one of these? How old were you? And tell us about that.
- [04:20]
Michael Weiland
I started when I was 11. Now this is for the Washington Post. You know, I grew up in Washington, D.C. area.
- [04:26]
Interviewer
Yes.
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Michael Weiland
And you had to be 12 to have a route. So I, so I assisted another carrier with his route. And then when I was 12, I became eligible and I got my own route and ultimately got a larger route. And I delivered until I was 16, you know, almost 17. And there are a lot of business leaders. I'm not putting myself in that category, but there are a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs who started as newspaper carriers. And it really teaches you a lot about the free enterprise system because you're not an employee, you're really an independent contractor. You're buying newspapers from the newspaper, selling them at a defined retail price, and pocketing the difference between wholesale and retail, plus whatever tips you can hustle from customers. And of course you also have expenses in terms of if you're carrying a canvas bag or you have a wagon, or you need the plastic bags or the rubber bands to hold the newspapers together and protect them. Well, those are costs to your micro business. And I was doing all that when I was a teenager and it was a very fun experience. And in fact, I remember one Christmas I'm sitting at my father's desk in his den in our house, and I have about $1,000 sitting on the table. Now this is 1976.
- [05:57]
Interviewer
That's a lot of money in 1976.
- [05:59]
Michael Weiland
Yeah, it was like three times the mortgage that my dad paid on the house we lived in in Vienna. And he came in and said, where did all this money come from? And I know he's thinking drug deals, you know, not that I was ever that Kid. But where else would a 16 year old get $1000 cash? And I looked at him and said, this is all from the paper route. I said, here are the checks, here's the cash, you know, here's what I'm giving the route manager, you know, to pay for everything. And yeah, I had it all counted out. And his jaw was dropping because he was a newspaper carrier when he was a kid. He delivered the Des Moines Register, but he made $4 a month. And I made closer to 120amonth at the time. But at Christmas that would double because a lot of people gave you Christmas tips that were equal to a month's cost of the paper. You know, the paper was $5 a month. They'd give you $10 at Christmas to thank you for a good year of service. So I had a lot of money sitting on that, on that desk. But I learned a lot, like I said, about free enterprise. You have to wake up at 4:15 in the morning every morning, 365 days a year. You know, you can't, you know, you can't just forget to do it. You know, you have to do it every day. So it does build a certain habit of responsibility. And in fact, I found myself less and less willing to exercise that responsibility. And that was my signal that I had to get out and go do something else. The other thing I figured out was that of that $120 a month I was making, 60% of that came from delivering the Sunday newspaper. And I said, okay, why am I working the other six days a week to get 40% of my monthly income? If I just delivered the Sunday newspaper, I'd have a nice little income for a high school kid and I could sleep longer those other six mornings of the week. And you say when you start having that kind of calculation, it's like, okay, I gotta do something else.
- [08:13]
Interviewer
Yeah, but. Well, first of all, not everybody is willing to start doing that. Sometimes their parents push them to do it. Sometimes there's an economic need in the family. It sounds like you did this because you wanted to do it. You chose to get up at 4:15 in the morning with your friend or whomever this was. You chose to not just do the route, but to not spend the money. That's how $1,000 in cash ended up on your dad's desk. And then you chose to do the calculation about the value of your time. Those are very unusual for many people, but certainly for an 11 year old. Where did all that come from?
- [08:53]
Michael Weiland
Well, you start thinking like a business Person, you know, which, you know, it was not my conscious desire to say, well, I'm starting my own miniature empire. I think part of where it came from was my father was an attorney in Washington D.C. he was in private practice, partner in a law firm. And so I grew up with someone who didn't just work for a paycheck, he actually had his own business. And he knew that he had to attract clients and serve those clients well in order to make money and to build a career. And so that was a little bit different experience than almost all of my neighbors parents worked for the government. And there's nothing wrong with working for the government. Okay, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that the employment experience, particularly in a very stable environment and in the 60s and 70s, working for the government was about as stable as you could get. I mean, short of having tenure at a university, it was about as stable as you could get. Well, these people were all GS, 13, 14, 15 level people. So they had good incomes and you know, their kids could go to college and all of those things. And you know, my family was one of the few where, yeah, dad made a good income, but he only made a good income as long as he worked hard and people thought well of him. And you know, and yeah, like I said, he didn't have a boss, but he did have partners. And as Alexandre Dumas said in the Count of Monte Cristo, he who has a partner has a master.
- [10:39]
Interviewer
Well, okay, so the lesson that you learned from that was that through observation or was it, you know, didactic is the wrong word. But did your father. Was your father the kind of person who told you these things or did you just sort of imbibe them?
- [10:55]
Michael Weiland
He would talk about them, but he was never consciously educating me about these things. He would just, he would tell stories about his own childhood delivering newspapers, for example, and he would tell about both the positive and the negative aspects of it. And so he said, okay, he knows what it means to do that. I haven't, you know, I have an understanding from him of what it might involve, you know, and he would come to me and, you know, I would say, I want to deliver newspapers. And he would say, that's great. Just know that you got to wake up every morning, just know that the weather isn't always going to be good. I say, okay, understood. You know, I get that. And so we would have those kind of conversations more than the. If you want to be a good newspaper carrier, here are the five things you need to do to be successful. No, no, no PowerPoint presentations in my house.
- [11:48]
Interviewer
Well, it also sounds as though you just, you were, and I don't mean this in a negative context, opportunistic about it. Here was an opportunity, you evaluated it, you undertook it, you did it to the degree that it made sense to you. You. So was there kind of an impetus developing about being your own man? I mean, in other words, having your own business. Did you even think about it that way yet?
- [12:17]
Michael Weiland
A little bit. I always knew that I was, I, that I wanted to be, that I was aspiring to be my own person. Now people would say I was a clone of my father. I mean, I emulated my father. I idolized my father, like a lot of eldest sons do. You know, some eldest sons don't, but a lot of eldest sons do emulate and idealize their, their father. But at the same time, one of the things that does differentiated him, one of his characteristics was he was always very much an individual because he came from, he came from a very poor background, broken home, ran away to join the army when he was a teenager. I mean he, you know, he had done three years of military service before he turned 19, went to college on the GI Bill, you know, got his way through Georgetown Law School and became an attorney in D.C. you know, this was a guy who was very much a self starter, if anybody ever was, and very much a rags to riches guy, if there was ever such a thing. And so, you know, okay, dad did it. I'm watching this as I'm growing up. That's what a man does. Yeah, that was the, that, that was the, you know, the subtext, you know, that was the understanding. It wasn't an expectation, but it was an understanding. And so yeah, I wanted very much to be my own person in some way, not necessarily the way he was, but in some way. And part of that was, you know, trying to pay for things myself if I could afford to pay for it. And that meant I had to work for money. Surprise, surprise, you got to work to get money. And so the newspaper delivery thing came along and it was preferable to the other options I had as a preteen slash teenager. So I thought, I'm going to go with this. Yeah, it allowed me to work on my own. It allowed me to, within certain parameters, you know, claim my own hours. And you know, it was, it was the right move for me at the time and I was always grateful to have had the experience.
- [14:32]
Interviewer
And you, as you say, sometimes sons admire or even emulate their fathers. Although our Paths are our own. But you chose not to go into the law. You chose not to go into military service, which, that's another example of many people gaining independence, for better or worse. And so. But you didn't go that path. In fact, it sounds like you, you didn't necessarily have a path except to be your own person. Is. Is that right?
- [15:03]
Michael Weiland
So.
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Interviewer
But you ended up studying.
- [15:05]
Michael Weiland
I thought I was going to be a lawyer. I really did okay. You know, I mean, I was a history buff, I was a politics buff. I was a news junkie. You know, I lived in Washington, D.C. the seat of government in the United States. A lot of things came together, said, gee, you know, lawyer makes a lot of sense, whether experiential or environmental or whatever. Well, what ended up happening was I just didn't have the eyes for it. I went to college and was expected to read massive amounts of texts, and my eyes would literally glaze over. Long before I was wanting to stop reading. I was unable to continue reading. And everything anybody had ever told me was that law school is reading on steroids, that, you know, if you think you're reading as an undergraduate, you don't know what you're going to hit when you get to law school. And I said, okay, if I'm having trouble now, I'm going to have more trouble then. I need to find something else to do.
- [16:11]
Interviewer
You didn't go to school in D.C. oh, I mean, I'm sure you went to high school in D.C. you went away. Where did you choose to go? Because I know you did study politics, but that's, that's.
- [16:22]
Michael Weiland
Yeah, I ended up going to the University of Dallas in Texas, the small Catholic university. And I was a major in political philosophy. They call it politics, but this is a Catholic school very much in the Western tradition. And they really taught politics as philosophy rather than politics as science. You know, we started off reading de Tocqueville and went on to read Aristotle long before we even got to Karl Marx. It was very much a philosophical exercise rather than a historical or, God forbid, statistical exercise, like a lot of political science curricula are, you know, you know, in America now. And so, yeah, so I went to. Went to UD University of Dallas. Really enjoyed it. I had a 1:1 semester sojourn to William and Mary because William and Mary had put me on the wait list when I applied. And they actually sent me a letter and saying, we're so sorry we didn't admit you. If you apply as a transfer student, we'll probably take you. And so I Went to William Mary and I enjoyed it, got good grades, but it just wasn't the same as the University of Dallas experience. I didn't have friends at William Mary the way I did at Dallas. So I went back and went to UD and, you know, enjoyed myself there. I did not get a degree at University of Dallas partially because of my own discipline issues, partially because of family complications. You know, we all have family drama in our lives, and I definitely went through my share of that in my late teens, early 20s. But I've always had that curiosity, always had that desire to learn, which really carries forward to this day. But that was my, you know, that was really my grounding, my educational grounding in political philosophy was what I did at University of Dallas.
- [18:31]
Interviewer
So you went to school there, but you didn't finish there. And then I know you came back and worked in D.C. so did you kind of cut your education at that point short so you could return home? Is that.
- [18:42]
Michael Weiland
Yeah, you know, there's, there's an element of that, you know, also talking about opportunities presenting themselves. It was presented to me, you know, I had an opportunity to work for a U.S. congressman. Frank Wolf is his name. He was a. From Northern Virginia for about 35 years.
- [19:01]
Jay Frost
Yes.
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Michael Weiland
And I worked for him because my late stepmother was his finance chair. And Frank was in effect, doing a favor for my stepmother by allowing me to be in his office. And what started out being a one or two month engagement turned into a much longer one because, you know, with, with all due modesty, I proved my value in that office. You know, I didn't treat it like it was a volunteer job where I could just show up and do what I wanted, when I wanted. I was actually doing the work. You know, I took it seriously. And, you know, a lot of the time I was there, I was an assistant to an assistant. And what I was doing was a wide variety of everything that was not legislation, everything from, you know, public, public events to correspondence, to working coordinating with the House Printing Office to make sure all the mass mailings were done on time and all of that kind of stuff. And it was a lot of fun. You know, burned a lot of shoe leather when I was there. One thing they don't tell you is, is that, you know, running around even just on the House side of the Hill, you know, takes a lot of steps. And, and, and so I was going through shoe leather at a prodigious rate. And, and the strange thing was Frank, who had actually worked on the Hill before he became a congressman, he and I Were talking one time and he asked me, he said, well, what's the thing you remember most? What's one thing that stands out? And I said, burning shoe leather. And he chuckled and said, yeah, me too. He says, not enough people mention that, but it's true.
- [20:52]
Interviewer
He was one of the longest serving. And these are. And I don't want to assume listeners know all these things. So this is the 10th congressional district, I think so right next to D.C. very thickly settled there. A lot of people in government, but also in military. And there are lots of different political opinions here. It might be described as a moderate area that was red that went to blue.
- [21:18]
Jay Frost
Yep.
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Interviewer
He, he, he had some, some policy stands that were on the more conservative side, even for his constituents. But he was famous, I think, for constituent relations, the very kinds of things you're describing. So even if people didn't necessarily love everything he thought or voted on all the time, they really liked being able to call and get an answer to something. And that's always done by the staff. I mean, it's with the support.
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Michael Weiland
Of course, at that time, a congressional district had about 550,000 people, you know.
- [21:54]
Jay Frost
Yeah.
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Michael Weiland
And his first term as a Congressman, we had 47,000 active case files.
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Interviewer
And explain what that means, because that's what that's really important.
- [22:05]
Michael Weiland
At least 1 out of 10 adults in his congressional district had filed an inquiry with his office to try to get him to do something, something either to benefit them or to redress a wrong done to them by a government agency. And so he invested heavily in constituent service, you know, whether it was finding a Social Security check or getting a visa or, you know, shaking loose a payment from the Pentagon for a small contractor. I mean, I remember meeting with a guy who was just starving because the Pentagon wouldn't pay him $20,000 he was owed on a contract. And all I did was write. Write a letter for the congressman to sign, send it over to the Pentagon and said, hey, would you take a look at this guy's file and, you know, see if there are any problem. Well, about two weeks later, the guy got his check. And the guy thought I walked on water. It wasn't me, you know, I, I mean, I'm using the congressman's name and sending over a letter. And I didn't say pay the guy. I said, look at the file. But that's what constituent service is. You know, I can't guarantee what the answer is going to be to your inquiry. I can just guarantee you that if I put the congressman's name on it and ask a question, that government agency is going to be more likely to move that inquiry toward the top of the pile.
- [23:34]
Interviewer
There's a lesson in that.
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Michael Weiland
Yeah.
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Interviewer
And for our sector, I know we're going to talk more about that in terms of all the work you've done for the past 36 plus years in the nonprofit sector. But I'm thinking about it's not just a member of Congress has a name and authority. So you send a letter and something happens, but they actually, somebody actually sent a letter to the right person, asked for something and knew how to ask for it respectfully and effectively. And those kinds of things matter, whether it's a congressperson, a person on the congressperson staff, or it's just Jane or John Doe in the middle of nowhere. Those kinds of relationships are vital to getting things done.
- [24:17]
Michael Weiland
Yeah. And being arrogant about it, even if you could have the excuse to be arrogant, you know, if I were the Senate majority leader and I'm sending a letter to an agency, I still have to be respectful because that agency representative is serving the federal government. They're serving the Constitution the same way I am. And so you have to be able to ask, but you have to be able to ask politely and in a collegial way and not try to impose your idea of a solution on them, but rather just say, take a look at this and tell me what you think. Now, the fact that I'm an influential member of Congress means that when you write me back and tell me what you've determined, you're going to be more likely to have thought it through and to have a very defensible response. To put it bluntly, you're not going to blow me off because I'm the Senate Majority leader or because I'm on a committee in Congress. You're actually going to think about your answer and make sure that that's the answer you could live with. And that's the value of having that advocate who is, you know, identified as having power and authority and status.
- [25:35]
Interviewer
And just one, one factoid in the middle of all this was you said 550,000 people per member of Congress. What does that look like today? Do you know the number? I should, but I don't.
- [25:44]
Michael Weiland
It's closer to 850.
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Interviewer
Yeah. So it's, it's. And that must mean that the case files. I'm saying this also in part because it's important to remember what it's like for people who are trying to represent, no matter how much we may or may not like Their particular policy standpoints. They're going to have a lot of people asking for stuff. And now it's a lot more people. It's almost. Almost twice as many.
- [26:06]
Michael Weiland
Yeah. And the staffs haven't grown proportionally. So, you know, I mean, yes, technology has. Has come in a little bit to assist staffs with getting the work done. But, yeah, it's a. It's a tough job. You know, it's a tough job, and there are no guarantees.
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Interviewer
How long are you there?
- [26:27]
Michael Weiland
I was there for a little less than a year. You know, like I said, really enjoyed it. I was going to jump to another position that would have paid better, was on the Senate side, but it ended up not working out, mainly because I said no. And if I had my life to live over again, I would have maybe said yes instead of no. But that decision ended up causing me to go back to Texas and work with my best friend from college, working with an oil man from Dallas. And I did that for about six years. And that taught me a lot about small business and big business both, and really brought the TV show Dallas to life because the guy I was working for was sort of a real life JR Ewing, although he always maintained that JR Ewing was too nice a guy to survive.
- [27:33]
Interviewer
Okay, so for people who don't know Dallas, look that up, because that's an important reference. But you were there for six years now. Did you ever imagine yourself, first of all, being in that kind of role, working in that kind of place, doing these kinds of things? Or again, was this just, this is something I can do? Where did that fit in your thinking about your life?
- [27:55]
Michael Weiland
Well, I always thought that I would be in some kind of management or leadership role, and I was being offered the opportunity to be the administrative person, person for this oil man's computer operation. You know, he had actually gone out and bought a computer. His eldest son, who at that time was about 40, was running the computer department. And my best friend from college was a programmer working for him. And they needed someone to do the office stuff, dealing with vendors and suppliers and, you know, keeping everything organized and, you know, keeping track of projects and so forth. And so they brought me in to do that. And I ended up learning some programming beyond what I had picked up when I was in high school, and, you know, started helping on that end as well. And I learned a fair amount about. About business and about the oil business in particular. And, you know, like I said, that curiosity thing kicked in. Plus the fact that both of the people I was working with were smarter than I was, you know, which is always a good thing. You want to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are. If you don't, if you can't figure out who the smartest person in the room is, you know, it might be you. And that's bad news. But, but in fact, the, the boss's son, the guy I was working for, he was not only a member of Mensa, he was of a member, a member of an even more elite group called Intertel, which is the top 1% of intelligence as opposed to Mensa, which is the top 2%. And so you would, you wouldn't believe some of the conversations we would have at dinner or over drinks about all the things that he was interested in and all the things that I was interested in. You know, we would start at point point A and then just travel the world in an hour or two, you know, and that was always very stimulating.
- [29:58]
Interviewer
So did you stay just for the length of time that you had something to learn or how did you decide to make this switch? And I know you made it with, I guess your girlfriend who became your wife because her name is on the firm's banner right alongside yours. So how was that transition from IT and oil to non profit management? What's the connective tissue?
- [30:20]
Michael Weiland
I understand there are two things that happened. The first one was that the owner of the business decided to fire his eldest son and change the way they were doing computer operations at the business. And you know, kind of the employment tip is if the owner fires his eldest son and you're working for the eldest son, your job probably is not real secure. Yeah, if we're getting rid of the department, we're going to get rid of everybody in the department. And that's what happened to me.
- [30:55]
Interviewer
Wow, that must have been a pretty unpleasant moment.
- [30:58]
Michael Weiland
If it was, it was, you know, not entirely surprising because I knew there were issues and, and a lot of the management lessons I learned in that environment were negative lessons. You know, things not to do, you know, things that don't work very well.
- [31:14]
Interviewer
Like.
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Jay Frost
Like what?
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Michael Weiland
Well, one thing we would talk about is the fact that, that he probably had 10 people total working for him doing various things, you know, whether it was accounting or land management, you know, managing the leases that you go out and get so you could drill oil wells, you know, and there were other things that were part of that as well as, of course, having a secretary and a receptionist. Well, there are about 10 people. And we would always talk about the fact that everybody had an inbox on their desk. But metaphorically speaking, no one in that company had an outbox. So nobody was sharing information.
- [31:54]
Interviewer
Oh, wow.
- [31:56]
Michael Weiland
The expectation was you were supposed to share everything you had with them, but they weren't sharing anything or volunteering anything, regardless of whether it would help you do your job better. So what it meant was, particularly as working in the computer department, which is trying to automate what the business does. If you don't know what people are already doing, it makes it more difficult to automate that. I came up with a rule during that time, you know, and I said, he said, you know, a company's automated systems are only as good or bad as the non automated systems the company has by nature. What happens is the computer system will mirror what's going on in the information flow otherwise. And, you know, definitely I learned that lesson there. You know, nobody was sharing information. So everybody's making guesses about what everybody else is doing. And of course, assuming that what you're doing is not as important as what I'm doing, because I know what I'm doing, I have no idea what you're doing because you're not sharing it with me. I'm just assuming. But what caused me to leave first, it was obviously loss of the job, but the other thing that happened was I met my girlfriend, later wife, you know, her best friend married my best friend in Washington D.C. they were both staffers for the House Budget Committee. And I was best man and Margaret was personal attendant for the bride. And we met at the rehearsal dinner. We were an item by the reception. We dated long distance for a year and a half. And so when I was let go from the oil business, it ended up making a heck of a lot of sense for me to relocate from Dallas to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where she lived. And so that's the combination of those two things got us together in Sioux Falls and put us on a path to starting the consulting practice.
- [34:08]
Interviewer
Had you been to Sioux Falls before?
- [34:11]
Michael Weiland
I had visited a few times to see her. And my father actually grew up in Iowa, not far from Sioux Falls. And so, you know, I, you know, the accent was very familiar to me and you know, I had gone to visit my grandparents a couple of times when I was a kid. So I'd been in Northwest Iowa, which is not far away from Sioux Falls. And so the area always felt very comfortable, plus the people were welcoming and Margaret had a good group of friends. She was development director for a non profit and she was well known for knowing everybody in town. You know, she was, you know, she was Very much an attractor and a connector, you know, in. In that world. So she knew nonprofit leaders, she knew business leaders. You know, she knew social people. And it was just amazing. We couldn't go out to the mall without running into three of her friends and colleagues. And that just blew me away because I had lived in big cities my whole life where, you know, it was an event if you actually ran into somebody you knew because there were so many other people you didn't know, of course. So. But it was always comfortable. And so I moved here in June of 89, and we started the business in September of 90. She had been working kind of moonlighting prior to that, but we started the business in September of 90 basically because we were both working for bad bosses and said we could be more successful on our own because our bosses are actually inhibiting our ability to be successful for them. You know, that was the real frustration, was we were working for people who weren't very good at their own businesses. And we were. We believed that we could be more successful for them if they would let us. And the fact that they weren't letting us said, well, you know, we can do stuff on our own and still pay the bills.
- [36:23]
Interviewer
But the choice of what to focus on, as well as the choice to work together, because not all couples can do that, you know, well, those are two big decisions right there, especially for a young married couple. So how did you decide, yes, we can do this. Not just we're good at this thing, but we can do it together. And then how did you decide to focus on this? I know that she was already probably moonlighting in something related to development, but that doesn't necessarily flow directly into nonprofit management.
- [36:55]
Michael Weiland
Well, she has a master's degree in education with emphasis and guidance and counseling, and she had extensive experience in nonprofit administration and management because she had worked in what was called the adjustment Training center system, you know, nonprofit serving adults with developmental disabilities. She had also taught in the classroom as a special educator. So she had a lot of experience related to nonprofit issues. And the moonlighting she had been doing was preparing grant applications for state government. And so when we decided to go out on our own, we were just going to be grant writers. That's technically incorrect term, but that's what everybody calls it. We were going to be grant writers primarily for state government. And she was going to provide the subject matter knowledge, and I was going to provide a lot of the business and technology knowledge to make the partnership successful. And so that's. Yeah. And that was an evolving process during 1990, we talked through it, and I worked with her on some things and while she was moonlighting, and we kind of got to the point where we said, yeah, this could potentially work. Now, I should mention also that we were not married at that time. We were boyfriend, girlfriend. We didn't actually get married until 1992. So it's interesting. We were together personally. We started the business, then we got married a couple of years later.
- [38:40]
Interviewer
Oh, there's a. And obviously this has worked for you because you're together today, but that's a lot of risk.
- [38:46]
Michael Weiland
Yes, it is. But, you know, I mean, I've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset. She had more of an entrepreneurial mindset because she was actually born and raised in northern South Dakota on a farm. So her family were all farmers. And in fact, I'm going to say something rural people will understand. She was raised in the house her family homesteaded in 1882.
- [39:14]
Interviewer
Oh, wow. No, that's very meaningful.
- [39:17]
Michael Weiland
So her family had extensive roots in that community, in that area, and she grew up on a farm. So if you want to talk about running a business, you know, all farmers run businesses. I mean, there's no other way of saying that, you know, unless they're employed by a, you know, a major concern. You know, if you think about farming in the traditional way most people think of farming, they're business owners. They go out and they buy and lease some land and they plant crops, and they harvest those crops and they sell them for the best price they can get. And so she, you know, she knew what it was to take risk in a business setting, you know, her whole life because she never done anything else.
- [40:00]
Interviewer
Well, and also, there's a lot of risk in farming that's implicit in that. But. But people who haven't been on a farm may not know that. So, sure, they run a business, but they don't control the weather, they don't control what's the commodity price next year. They don't control when apples get dumped from China or whatever happens. And geopolitically, so it's hail.
- [40:20]
Michael Weiland
Hail comes along, or, you know, or there's a blight of some kind on the crops or the cattle get sick and start dying and you're losing, you know. You know, a single cow dies and you lose at least $2,000 today.
- [40:34]
Jay Frost
Right.
- [40:34]
Michael Weiland
You know, that's what it costs to lose a cow. But, yeah, so, yeah, there's a lot of risk. And the. The profit margin in farming is vanishingly small, like 1% on average, it's worse than a restaurant, have to have huge operations in order to support, you know, one or more families. And her family managed to do it, you know, and her father, who had had an eighth grade education, ultimately became, in effect, a multimillionaire. Now almost all of it was in land and equipment. So it's not like he was King Midas sitting on a pile of gold coins. Coins. But he had, you know, he became very successful to the point where he was able to give each of his sons, not his daughters, but his sons, give each of his sons sufficient resources to start their own farm operations, you know, without incurring debt. And so, you know, that was a big point of pride with him and it should have been, you know, it's the, you know, you know, how many of us would have loved to hand to our children, you know, debt free, the, the means to run their own businesses.
- [41:47]
Interviewer
But she did not receive that.
- [41:50]
Michael Weiland
She did not receive that.
- [41:51]
Interviewer
But she had the lessons.
- [41:52]
Michael Weiland
She knew she had the lessons. Yes. And, and she did get a small piece of land as a gift when, when she got her master's degree. And, and, and so part of her net worth has always been the lease payment on that land, which is not life changing money. But anyone who has an investment knows that it's nice to have that little check on the side coming in to finance a project. Like in our world, if we wanted to do something to fix or improve the house, a lot of times it was done with the land payment. Payment, you know, it was that kind of money. It was very nice to have and a very valuable thing to have, but still had to work for a living. Yeah, yeah.
- [42:39]
Interviewer
So the, the two of you were unmarried, decided to start a business. Yeah. Then you were running the business and then you got married in 92. But the business itself, it sounds like it evolved past the grant writing, as you say, to something that looked at broader issues. And you've been doing this now for a long time. So I don't mean you to have to be like an accordion and suddenly cram 36 years into 36 seconds, but how did you get to the point where it was really focused on the kinds of issues that at least you write and talk about so much.
- [43:13]
Michael Weiland
Well, the good news is I thought about this and I can compress that accordion to a fair extent. We, we did. We prepared grant applications mostly for state government for several years. And we noticed two things. One of them was that grant writing, if you're a consultant, is very much a time and materials kind of business rather than a value add kind of business. You only have so many hours a day, a week, a month, you can sell grant. Grant writing has been very deadline driven and it's very stressful in a lot of cases. And you say, God, you know, after doing this for five or six years, I, you know, I'm, I'm starting to get tired of it. Even though I've been successful at it, I'm starting to get tired. The other thing we started noticing was we had some clients who were unsuccessful at implementing the programs that the grants were funding. And we said, okay, we, we really have to get to why are they not being successful. And usually it was a matter of leadership. It was a matter of lack of coordination within the organization or between organizations. We often facilitated collaborative groups that were applying for a grant as a consortium with one of the entities being the actual applicant and everybody else participating in the process. And we said, okay, we really need to get into strategy because a grant application is really a strategic plan on a project or program level. What we need to do is to get into strategic planning on an organizational level so that the grants that fund the strategic plan actually make sense and fit better into the overall organization organizational trajectory. And so we started doing a lot of strategic planning with clients, often many of the same clients we had been working with before, but less government and definitely much more non profit organization. We joke that we've done everything from A to Z, agriculture, conservation, all the way to zoos. But not surprisingly, a lot of our work has been in, in education and healthcare, you know, what nonprofit people love to call the EDs and MEDs, you know, and partially because that's where the money is. You know, if you take a look at what kind of organizations are the, you know, have the most revenue or the most resources. A lot of times they are hospitals and health systems and they are university. So they're more likely to go out, get a consumer consultant than, you know, a five person, locally based, non profit, you know, you know, because they just can't afford, you know, that kind of help, or if they do, it's a sacrificial gift, you know, sacrificial expense that they make very rarely. So we're doing strategic planning, which means we're working with boards of directors and CEOs. And what we're learning is there are a lot of boards of directors that don't necessarily work very well and particularly don't work very well together. And that really got us into board governance, you know, trying to help those board members and the board collectively and the CEO, you know, work smarter, work better, work together. That's my Tagline on my LinkedIn profile is, you know, I want to help boards and CEOs work smarter, better and together. And, you know, you learn a few things about boards and about CEOs, you know, through that process. And we've been doing that almost exclusively for the last 15 years. You know, we've occasionally done strategic planning for hospitals during that time. We've also done a certain amount of executive search for nonprofit CEOs, almost always for clients who brought us in for other reasons and then said, oh, by the way, we just lost our CEO or oh, by the way we just fired our CEO. We need help, you know, with an interim exec or ongoing exec.
- [47:26]
Interviewer
What about board recruitment? Have you done work on board recruitment as well? Because if, if you were focused on this kind of issue of governance that obviously starts at the top. And I know we have to get into it, but some of the issues I'm sure that you've been contending with over these 15 years anyway have to do with this kind of self fulfilling prophecy where people are brought in to do one thing, but then they really need them to do another. But were they the right person to do that? Did they have an explanation for that? So have you been working also to not only help find CEOs, but help find board members who could really make the job effective?
- [48:10]
Michael Weiland
I'd say we help find board members, but what we really do is help, you know, help boards craft a selection process, you know, a recruitment and selection process so that they can go out in their own communities, among their own people and find the individuals who are best likely to be able to support the mission and, and assist the organization to be successful. And there's a lot of that, that, you know, a lot of the problems with boards go very much to the, you know, failure in the recruitment and selection phase. People are recruited for the wrong reasons. Hey, so and so was a multimillionaire. We need to get their name on our letterhead. We'll put them on the board. And it's like, you know, we don't know whether this person has any passion for, for our mission. We don't know whether they have the time to come to the board meetings. And we don't know whether they have the dedication to show up when we need them to show up. But we're going to get their name, we're going to get that person. And what we try to do instead is we really try to Identify roles. You know, what do we need a board member to do? You know, some board members are good at fundraising, others aren't. And that's just fine, because what we need, you know, is a board that can govern. That's the real role of a board member. It's not to be a fundraiser. It's not to be, you know, a publicity source. It's to actually meet the legal and regulatory responsibilities of being in leadership of a nonprofit corporation. So how do we find a different, diverse group of people that can meet those criteria and, oh, by the way, tag a couple of other priorities, like, you know, being able to give or get money, being able to have expertise in areas that the board would benefit from, having information in, in that area, and so forth. Yeah. And then we try to design those systems so that they can go out and find, you know, identify the roles and then identify the people to fill those roles.
- [50:22]
Interviewer
Right. And you said a couple things in there that I wanted to just tick off the list. One was use the word diverse. And there's a lot of talk about diversity, and we seem to be having, I don't know, a crisis of confidence in whether or not we can even use this language. But you did use that here, and you've been using it, I'm sure, throughout the recruitment process for. For many years. And every community is different. So the definition of diversity, I'm sure, is also pretty specific to the place and the people. But how important is a diverse board?
- [50:54]
Michael Weiland
Well, diversity has a number of definitions. The popular definition has to do with race and ethnicity and, to a slightly lesser extent, gender. But when I use the word diversity, I really am talking about all of diversity, which can include geographic diversity, it includes socioeconomic diversity, it can include educational diversity, it can include, you know, life experience or professional diversity. There are all kinds of diversity that can come into that board. Recruitment, you know, board, you know, identification, experience. And I had a girlfriend in high school who gave me a book to read one time, and I love the title. It was called you'd God is Too Small. And I've always wanted to write the book that says, your diversity is too small, because diversity is a lot more than the two or three things that are most commonly identified. And I better believe that because I live in a county that is 90% Caucasian. So I know I need a diverse board. But I'm not going to get there by recruiting from the community because 90% of the community looks like me. And I know that's a bad idea. We need to get people who are not me. And what does not me look like? And so we take a look at those other factors. It's like, if it's a strange statewide organization, we don't just get board members from the largest city in the state. You know, you know, if it's an organization that serves people in need, then we better have at least a couple of people who've been former clients or current clients of the organization so they have a seat at the table.
- [52:44]
Interviewer
And you use that word socioeconomic diversity, too. So. Or those words. And that's. That is also another. It's another choice, but it influences another thing that you talked about when you went through the list, which is they kind of. They give or get, or as I like to think about a give and get. So let me just ask you, whether or not how important do you think it is that board members are financially contributing and soliciting and then how that relates to socioeconomic diversity? Because some people have said, especially in the last few years, well, there are almost two points of view. You can't have people who don't have the money serving the board. The other is you can't ask people who are, you know, we want people to be reflective of the entire community. Debt diversity, socioeconomic diversity. But those people don't have the money. Everybody seems to be making decisions for everybody else. So help us understand how important is it that people do give and solicit and can that coexist with true socioeconomic diversity in governance?
- [53:46]
Michael Weiland
And I argue that it can. I believe that every board member should give at a meaningful level to them. And, you know, I mean, I was working with a Head Start organization, and by. By regulation, half of Head Start policy, council members have to be clients of the organization. Organization and, you know, socioeconomic issues are one of the big determinants. Well, that person, $5 could be a meaningful gift. And, you know, say, okay, you know, take the five bucks and thank them very much for their contribution. And other people on the board might be able to give 1,000 or 5,000 or whatever.
- [54:34]
Interviewer
You.
- [54:34]
Michael Weiland
You take that money and you thank them very much. But what you promote to the community, to other funders, to the federal government, as you're writing the Head Start grant application, is we have 100% participation in philanthropy from our leadership. That's the criterion. And to the extent you can have board members giving and. Or getting you do that. I'm a big believer in the buddy system myself, where a board member goes out with the executive director or goes out with another board member to make the Major asks whether they're corporate sponsorships or whether they're high net worth individuals or high income individuals who have been identified as potentially being donors. You know, there are a lot of ways board members can help help with the get part without necessarily having the capacity to give. But the benchmark is everybody needs to give at a personally meaningful level. And I've always said there are two criteria for that. One of them is they're giving as much or more to your organization on, on whose board they serve than they're giving to any other organization. That's one way of measuring it. The other way of measuring it is they're giving at a sufficient level that they actually have to have a conversation with their spouse before they write the check. Now, for some people, that can be $100. For some people, it can be a million dollars. You know, and I've had friends of mine who fit both categories. I will tell you, in my family, my wife and I give up to between 500 and $1,000 just on our own thing because we think it's a good cause. We'll go ahead and commit and write the check. If it gets up to $1,000 or more, we're going to have a conversation about it. Not because we're in opposition to each other, but just because in the context of our, of our overall budget, our overall net worth thousand dollars means something. You know, we're actually choosing one thing over another at that point. So we have the conversation.
- [57:00]
Interviewer
I want to ask you if there is a lesson for nonprofits in the way they think about the size of a gift and whether or not they consider something major or not. Because what you just described, you didn't say that $1,000 is all you could give. You said that's where you have a conversation together. And there are lots of ways that people can give, and some of them are overtime and some of them are after we pass. So would you, having worked with all these organizations, how would you counsel nonprofits to think about donors on the basis of the size of a gift they've made? And if that should influence their, their, their way, think about those donors and the relationships they build with them?
- [57:51]
Michael Weiland
Well, I think that, you know, you know, people are different, you know, and they're motivated by different things and everyone has aspects of their budget that they are abnormally tight about and others that they are very spendthrifty about. You know, in my own life, I will tell you, for example, I don't resent having to get haircuts, but there's something about paying for a haircut that just says, you know, why am I wasting money on a haircut? So I mean, it's totally irrational and I know that it's irrational and I don't blame the barber. You know, it's, it's just one of those things, you know, that's like, well, you know, and, and at the same time I'll say, oh, there's a golf trip I can go on and it's going to cost me fifteen hundred dollars for two days. But it's a great place and people I like, I'm in, you know, which sounds, you know, to lot of people very self indulgent. And I, believe me, I respect that too. But everybody has different priorities and places a different value on different activities and different decisions. And it's really about listening to the donor and understanding their story before you make the pitch or come in with a preconceived idea of what they ought to be willing to give. You know, that's one of those things that always struck me as being a little bit off that somebody would come in and presume to know your priorities and your values better than you do without listening to you first. That's part of it.
- [59:41]
Interviewer
This is where actually I reached out to you because you made some comments in a LinkedIn post about two people. One, it sounds like you were close to both of them, but clearly in different ways. One was a name that I think everybody who's in philanthropy anyway would recognize and that's T. Denny Sanford. But I don't want to assume that. So of course I'd love it if you tell me more about that person, how you came to know them. But the other is about a relative. And I'm sure that all your professional work has led you to think thoughtfully and deeply about all these issues, governance and relationship to resources. But I'm sure your personal relationships with people like this as well as your own philanthropic activity also inform your thoughts and your feelings on this whole sector. So can you tell us a little bit about this whole thing with Sanford and then also this relative and where has that been in your thinking?
- [60:37]
Michael Weiland
Sure. T. Denny Sanford is a banker, or was. He died last weekend at age 90. He was a banker. He owned one of the largest credit card issuing banks in the United States. He had been successful with two or three other businesses. He grew up in very poor circumstances, very humble circumstances, you know, classic rags to riches story. At his height he was like ranked about number 100 on the Forbes 400 list while simultaneously being ranked in the Chronicle of Philanthropies Philanthropy 50 list. He was an early adopter of the Giving Pledge. For those who remember the Giving Pledge, his goal was to die broke. He wasn't able to do it because his business kept on shoveling money at him faster than he could give it away. Gee, we should all have such problems. But I met Denny about 30 years ago because he and I were both members of the same country club and both golfers, and we would have dinner together as part of a men's group on Wednesday nights and got to the point where he and I would play golf together occasionally. And I'm not going to tell you that he and I were bosom buddies because he had thousands of friends. You know, he never met someone who he didn't like. You know, he might change his mind after meeting them, but upon meeting them, he was very open and, you know, engaging as an individual. And, you know, I had a good relationship with, with him for 20 years plus, and then I resigned my club membership. And he and I did not run into each other very often beyond that. But, but anyway, I, you know, I had a chance to talk to him about philanthropy, had a chance to listen to what his beliefs were, what his priorities were. And one of the big things for him was disadvantaged children, because he grew up as a disadvantaged child. And, you know, and I remember him telling me one night, he said, if you want to get my money, if you want to get my interest as a philanthropist, talk to me about disadvantaged children and how your organization and its services are going to help kids who need help. Say, God, that's about as direct as you can get and as reasonable as you can get. You know, it's like, okay, let me write this down. And, and I would, you know, and I would talk to my clients, you know, from time to time. I'm not a fundraising consultant, but every so often they would ask me, you know, and I would say, if you're going to approach Denny, this is how you need to do it. And oh, by the way, the other aspect of Denny was that he was very much a businessman and he wanted to see your business plan and he wanted to see your financials before, before he ever decided to get involved with you. If he didn't believe that you were running a good business as a non profit, then he wouldn't throw money at it, you know, because he was afraid it would be wasted. And, and he would grill you. And the better a business person you were, the more he would grill you about your business plan and your financials, because he really wanted to know. He wanted to know how you worked, why you made the choices you did, and whether or not his support for your mission would be well invested. You know, that was, that was really Denny in a nutshell. And the big support that he always gave and his support grew over time. I mean, you know, he started out giving, you know, a couple of million, you know, and then was approached to do something in Minnesota that he ended up backing away from because both Denny and at this time as University of Minnesota, neither of them really understood what the priorities of the other were. And an agreement to support kind of fell through. But he started out, you know, doing those kind of things and ended up giving almost $2 billion to the health system that now bears his name, Sanford Health, formerly Sioux Valley Hospital. And the seminal gift was a 400 million dollar gift, you know, which was huge. I mean, also remember, we're talking about Sioux Falls, South Dakota here. We're not talking about New York or Chicago or LA. We're talking about Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And 400 million is big money anywhere, but it's really big money out here. But that was a lot of my experience with Denny was I had the, the opportunity and the, the, you know, the distinction of being able to sit with him in casual situations, in social situations, and learn about him as a person. And I can guarantee you that I never asked him for a dime the whole time I knew him. I never crossed over into that, you know, potential liability column, that someone who has their handout, you know, column. I was always someone who was just friendly with Denny, you know, because I liked him and he liked me. And, you know, that was perfect. I didn't have any pressure on me to try, try to raise money from him or try to get him to pay me to do something. So, hey, you know, I was free. I was free to have the relationship with him I chose to have and that he chose to have with me.
- [66:25]
Interviewer
But it does sound like, had that relationship been different, he was as kind of a straight shooter. He expressed what was important to him. And if an organization had listened to and been able to address those issues honestly and thoughtfully and effectively, that they could have been an attractive place for him to make an investment, which he was very public about making. There are not too many people on that giving pledge. And so it says a lot about what you were talking about right before I asked you in the way that we listen to one another and how that informs our understanding of people, not making assumptions about people.
- [67:08]
Michael Weiland
Well, there's a. There's a short story about Denny. You know, he was talking with an educational institution about making, you know, a significant gift. And he and the university president had gone to dinner, and they're walking out to the parking lot, and across the parking lot, you know, you know, Denny says to the university president, whatever you're thinking about, think bigger. And, gee, wouldn't we all love to have a major donor encouraging you to think bigger.
- [67:41]
Interviewer
But is there a lesson in that, too, that should they have to tell us to think bigger?
- [67:48]
Michael Weiland
Well, yeah, there's a temptation, and I don't want a stereotype here, but there's a temptation to have a bit of a scarcity mentality, you know, and kind of say, you know, how little can I get away with, you know, to. To hopefully achieve what I want to achieve. You know, there's a great story for a great line from an old movie about an honest man never asks for enough. You know, when, like, he's going to the bank for a loan or going back. An honest man never asks for enough. And you have to get over that a little bit bit and say, ask for what you need, you know, ask for what you need that will actually guarantee the results you intend. And, you know, and part of what Denny was saying in that parking lot was, you know, I want to have real impact. I want my money to have real impact. You know, I want to be recognized as a philanthropist. So ask me for something that is going to be worthy of that recognition and that investment, you know, that's going to have that kind of recognition, that kind of impact, you know, I want that. And that's more important than whether you asked me for 40 million or 50 million or 70 million.
- [69:05]
Interviewer
Now, when you wrote that piece, you reflecting on that relationship, and I appreciate your sharing that, because a lot of people won't obviously have known him personally. We only hear about dollars. We don't hear about the person. So it's. It's really great to hear that. But another is a member of your family who's not as well celebrated at all. The name is not well known, but also very generous. And I'm sure that also makes you reflective on everything that you've been doing. Could you share about that person, but also what you took away from the two, when you think about the two together. And what is the lesson for all of us in that? What's the challenge?
- [69:42]
Michael Weiland
The person we're talking about is my. For want of a better term, my step grandmother. My. You know, my father married his second wife when I was about 21, and so she was my stepmother. My stepmother's mother is the. The woman I was writing about, to put it bluntly. And shortly, my stepmother's grandfather found a daughter alchemical. And when. When I first met my wife, Margaret, she went back to Sioux Falls and she looked up my stepmother's family. And she calls me almost immediately because she's a development director. You know, she's out prospecting for money, you know, so she's looking at the foundation center listings and all that. She calls me and says, michael, do you know that that family has a $40 million foundation and they're still alive? That was. And I said, well, yeah, I knew they had a foundation because, you know, the five daughters and the mother and father are the trustees, and, you know, they. They'll talk about it sometimes when they get together. And I said, yeah, I know. I didn't know it was for 40 million because I didn't look it up. You know, it really, you know, it wasn't important to me because I wasn't part of the foundation and all that. But, yeah, okay, 40 million sounds about right, because I have a vague idea of what the family is worth. And so I learned a lot indirectly, just going to family events, you know, Christmas, most notably. And they would talk about foundation business, often obliquely. Know, what charities are we supporting or what gifts were the most rewarding for them to have been involved in. For example, the. The. The family, and particularly my stepmother's mother raised and supplied the money to build the football museum at the University of Michigan. You know, because my stepmother's mother watched every football game at home, football game at Michigan in the press box. You know, they. She was a dyed in the wool Michigan fan her entire life. And, you know, and in fact, Bo Schembechler did her eulogy, you know, when she died. You know, she was that close to Michigan football, and she lived in Ann Arbor, and she had a lot of other connections to the university. But we talked about the foundation stuff as well, and talking about, you know, support and occasionally about people who made bad assumptions about the foundation support and whether or not Margaret Towsley would actually write a check to an organization without going through the foundation, which rarely happened. But she died in the early 90s, and at the time she passed away, she was worth about $500 million, give or take. And a lot of the money did actually go to her children. But she had been giving essentially her entire adult life through that foundation. She'd given millions of dollars. You know, her largest Gift every year out of that foundation was probably about a million dollars. And we're talking 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. So million dollar gift was big. I mean, it's big now, but it was really big 70 years ago.
- [73:14]
Jay Frost
Yeah.
- [73:15]
Michael Weiland
So, you know, so it. You know, but what I learned was how people with that kind of generational wealth talk about it and deal with each other when talking about it. And what you learn are two things. It's almost like. Like the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway by play. You know, Hemingway says, the rich. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Fitzgerald says the rich are different. And Hemingway says, yes, they have more money. And I found that to be very true. In a lot of ways, these people are like everybody else. You ever met my stepmother, who was worth $40 million. When I met her, she was in her kitchen clipping coupons to go to the grocery store just because she thought clipping coupons was a good thing to do because she could save money. No, it had absolutely no impact on the way she lived her life. You know, but, you know, also, these were people who would spend incredible amounts of money and give incredible amounts of money, and they were comfortable. Comfortable wearing both hats at the same time. And if you don't know people who are wealthy, particularly with generational wealth, then you don't appreciate the fact that they can be human and other than human at the same time. You know. You know, what the rest of us think is other than human. It's like, well, what do you mean? You're talking about giving away a million dollars like it's nothing. Say, well, because mentally, I've already made that decision. You know, it's already in the foundation. It's just a matter of how we distribute it. But I also saw, particularly after my step grandmother passed away, how hurt the family was to find out that she had been taken advantage of by a couple of charities and by her own staff. You know, there were charities that came in and said, well, you know, Margaret promised us $150,000 and said, well, that seems odd because she's never given your organization any money before. Do you have any documentation? Oh, no, it was a verbal promise. And at that point, your jaw just kind of drops. Because this is a woman with an extensive history of philanthropy with a good paper trail to show how she does it. So what's being alleged or asserted in this case is really exceptional. And, you know, and of course, by the time she passed away, she was almost 90, I think, you know, she was well into her 80s at least. It's like, okay, you know, this seems like the most charitable way to determine is opportunism on the part of these charities, saying, oh, well, somebody just passed away in the area, let's see if, if we can cash in, you know, and, and so, you know, you see some of the worst as well as some of the best. You know, when, when you're that close to a situation with someone who, you know, someone who you have affection for but you're not personally, you know, part of their world. You know, I, what I love to tell people is there's a heck of a difference between being family and being step family. And like I said, they always treated me very well. They were always very kind to me. I have absolutely nothing but good things to say about how I was treated by them and how I was welcomed into their homes and into their lives. But I knew darn well I wasn't in the will and never expected to be, you know, and that's just fine.
- [77:00]
Interviewer
Right?
- [77:01]
Michael Weiland
Yeah. So. I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [77:05]
Interviewer
No, I was going to say that when you wrapped up some of that in your post, you talked about, well, you posed a question. You said after Denny, who's next? But you, it was really about both of those, those folks very different. One came from wealth, clipped coupons to be sure, but was giving every single year. The other one came from, from relative poverty, you know, decided to make well created great wealth but then gave most much of it away. And then the question, I wonder was that question about who's next, was that about which billionaire is next, which multimillionaire is next? Or were you asking also about the rest of us and what our responsibilities are?
- [77:50]
Michael Weiland
Both, you know, because there, there has to, you know, there has to be a calling, you know, to be generous in a philanthropic way. You know, whether we're talking about writing big checks or whether we're talking about, you know, chairing the boards of the, of the most influential organizations. And it's easy to say, well, Denny Sanford is doing it all, or Margaret Towsley is one of the leading lights or, you know, name the person in your town or city who is identified as being one of the leaders in philanthropy and nonprofits. Well, there has to be some bench strength there. There has to be somebody else coming up. There has to be a next generation. And you know, you can say, well, you know, you know, we have to go out and recruit that person. Well, yeah, but that person also has to have the calling. You have to have it within you to be that person. Or else the recruiting Effort is not going to work. So in the context of the eulogy that Bo Schembechler gave for Margaret Towsley, it was the who among you will come out and do the kinds of things that Margaret did her entire life? You know, not just building a building or building a museum or, you know, giving a million dollars a year, but who among you is going to participate in community life in a meaningful way, you know, to build the social capital, to build, you know, the quality of life, you know, in our community and by extension, the broader world, you know, you know, in accordance with your talents and in accordance with your, you know, with your, with your assets, you know, with your ability to, you know, to provide funding. And, you know, most donors, you know, start out with smaller amounts and then go to larger amounts. It's very rare that the first gift someone gives is a billion dollars. You know, they'll start out with something smaller first. You know, the traditional donor pyramid is built on that idea. You know, if I can get them to respond to the direct mail appeal, and if they do it for three years in a row, maybe I can bump them up, you know, and then how far can I bump them up? It's rare to have the situation like the president of the University of Richmond would play golf with the CEO of ah. Robbins never asked him for a gift, but when the CEO passed away, he made a testamentary gift to Richmond of $72 million. Surprise. Yeah, I mean, you know, those are surprises not only because they are unexpected, but also because they're so darn rare. You know, it's like the janitor who gives his quarter million to the university where he was sweeping the halls, you know, his entire career. You know, it's. Nobody expects that, but gee, was. It happens. But it's rare. It's more common for people to build, you know, knowledge than a relationship, than an affinity, you know, and in the way they develop a passion along the way and that turns into the transformative gifts, you know, that we celebrate.
- [81:14]
Interviewer
So is that one of the, the lessons that, that you've taken from all this work that you've been doing for so long, you together as a team, because you've worked with all these governance issues which can really get into the weeds, but they're critically important to keep these places safe, legal, effective, thriving. But then ultimately some of it must be philosophical because you have a group of people sitting around a table and saying, what is it we want to achieved so that when we pass, roll off the mortal coil, what we've left behind, is greater than it was when we got here. What's the biggest lesson maybe for you or the two of you as you've done that work?
- [81:53]
Michael Weiland
Well, there's a balancing act that happens. There are some boards that are so operational in nature that you almost have to raise them up to have a vision beyond what's happening this quarter or this year. What is the transformative thing you're doing or what is the real sustaining thing, thing you're doing in the community. If you weren't here, what would go wrong? You know, sometimes is the question that needs to be asked. You know, it's not that you constantly have to grow. It's not that you constantly have to have escalating impact. It's always. It can also be a matter of, you know, who doesn't get treated, who doesn't get education, who doesn't get mental health, you know, services, you know, who doesn't get rescued from, from abusive homes. If we're not here to do it, I mean, it's easy to get caught up into the individual cases or financially what's happening this quarter or this year. But we really have to say, what impact are we having? And that's the real intangible reward of participating in the leadership of these organizations. Conversely, you can have organizations that will say, we're so tied to the, the mission, broadly written, that we don't necessarily care about the finances this quarter or this year. Somehow we'll meet the needs that we have because our hearts are pure and our intent is so great that it'll happen. And then you have to take those boards and kind of focus them down a little bit and say, yes, but you got to have money in the bank in order to make that happen. And if you can't make payroll, people are going to look for jobs where they can make money. So there's always this tension between having global impact, but yet being able to pay the bills and be sustainable. There's a big thing about sustainability in nonprofits. The key thing about sustainability, sustainability is to be here not only this year, but also next year and the year after. And sometimes that means making some short term sacrifices in order to have longer term, you know, benefit. And particularly when I deal with founding nonprofit leaders, one of the uncomfortable questions I will ask them is, do you want this nonprofit to survive you, you know, because if you do, then your role in the non profit is going to be very different because it's not about you exercising your passion, it's about you facilitating other people to build their own passion. And build their own capacity, you know, within the nonprofit structure. And that means you got to back away a little bit. And that can be very, very difficult. I was talking with one nonprofit founder and I said, there's a two part test. You know, you say you want to back away, but you're jumping in every time the organization looks like it has a problem. I said, the first test is that you actually stop yourself from jumping in when there's a problem. You let the board and the CEO and the staff work through it themselves. The second test is the next time it happens, you do the same thing. That's when you know that you've really begun to back away from the organization you founded and allow that organization to survive on its own resources, you know, resources you may well have given them, but still, you know, their own leadership, their own passion, their own vision, you know, has to run the organization. If you keep on jumping in, their response is going to be to expect you to jump in. So you know that, you know, there's a, there's a big lesson there for founders. In fact, this particular founder had a, had a advisor and he said to the founder, he said the first thing you have to do is stop giving money to your nonprofit. Said you've dumped about $5 million into this thing so far and it's working, but you need to find other funding sources. You got to stop funding this yourself because no one else will take it seriously as long as you're doing that.
- [86:18]
Interviewer
This almost sounds like a. We're talking about parenting.
- [86:24]
Michael Weiland
Yes, yes, very much. There's a, there's a great book from a now deceased author named Charles Collier. It's called wealth and Families. And it was talking about the practice of establishing family foundations. He was a, he was a plan giving major gifts officer at Harvard. And he talked about how, you know, how do you involve the family, how do you involve younger members of the family? And the purpose of having the family foundation is to build family function as well as a family awareness about philanthropy. It's not just a philanthropic exercise, it's a family strengthening exercise, acknowledging that it's really not going to work beyond the third generation anyway, because foundations really don't, you know, the last trustee who knew the founder, when that person dies, the organization is completely different, you know, you know, and, and so you have to decide that the family foundation is important. It's there for a purpose, but the purpose has a definite clock attached to it because the family, you know, when the family goes, when the last grandchild passes away, everyone in that boardroom is unattached from the founder. And so they're going to do philanthropy the way they see it or the way they interpret the founder's intent rather than what the founder actually intended. You know, and we've seen that over time. You know, everything from the Ford foundation to the Hewlett foundation to, you know, the Bush Foundation. You know, a lot of foundations that started out as family philanthropies, as time goes on, they've been redefined. And you can argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But inarguably, it's a different thing. I think about that with my step Families Family Foundation. They're decades away from getting to that point. Many of them still remember Margaret Townsley. But there will come a point when they have to address the fact of, what do we want this organization to be 70 years after Margaret passed away? Bill Gates had that issue, his whole thing about, we're going to sunset the foundation 25 years after Melinda and I pass away away. Unless one of the kids has a huge interest in philanthropy, in which case we'll let it go on for an additional 25 years. But in no case will the Gates foundation last longer than 50 years after our deaths. You know, that was the design. Now, I. I think the design may have changed, but that was the design as it was described to me 10 years ago. And, you know, that's, you know, this for good forever always should have an asterisk next to it, in my opinion.
- [89:37]
Interviewer
Michael, I just. Last question.
- [89:39]
Michael Weiland
Sorry.
- [89:39]
Interviewer
There's somebody looking at you over your shoulder.
- [89:43]
Michael Weiland
Ah, yes, yes. That is my maternal grandfather, William Randolph Hearst Gosser. And he was in charge of what was then called relief, basically social services in Portland, Oregon, in the 1930s. He was on MacArthur's staff during World War II, administering military benefits to the men under MacArthur's command. And after the war, he went to Germany, was in charge of displaced persons and refugees, the American zone of occupation. So, yeah, he was a social worker, you could say, but with some very interesting assignments. He was the first military governor of Tokyo after World War II. And one of the things I learned from him is what that kind of service can take out of you, what it forces you to sacrifice of yourself in order to be successful in your roles. You know, he came home from Germany in 1952 and had no interest in being in a leadership or managerial position the rest of his life after having lived a rather. What in my opinion, was a rather extraordinary life of service. So. And I always, you know, I love my granddad, but I always love the picture also because to me, he looks a lot like Walter Cronkite. In fact, I've shown the picture to people and they say, is that Walter Cronkite? You know, I said, no, it's not. But I get it.
- [91:35]
Interviewer
Thank you, Michael.
- [91:35]
Michael Weiland
So it's all part of the, you know, it's all part of, of the tapestry that comes into my life and talk about unintended consequences. When I was a child, I had no idea I'd get involved in non profit consulting or service and but I was around a man who had done social service in a number of guises most of his career.
- [91:57]
Jay Frost
Well, that's it for this episode of the PM Podcast. You can learn more about Michael Weiland and his work with Sumption and weiland@sumptionandwyland.com Our thanks to our sponsor, Evertrue, a Philanthropy first intelligence platform that helps fundraising teams turn data into action and build real donor relationships, working with non profits, healthcare organizations and educational institutions across the country. Our producer is Jack Frost and our theme music is Moving Out, Moving in by Jay Taylor, courtesy of Epidemic Sound. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe and check out our sister shows, Front Lines of Social Good and How to Raise all part of the Philanthropy Mastermind series. Until next time. I'm Jay Frost.
- [92:43]
Interviewer
Thanks for joining me.