For successful nonprofit alliances or mergers, strategies should fit together like two pieces of a puzzle. When two organizations come together, their missions and cultures should provide common ground, but their strategies can be quite unique. This creates a 1+1=3 multiplication effect. As my friend Toyditz Cosico, an asset-based development guru, often says, "Don't compete with each other, complete each other."

What then is the role of aligning missions for strategic alliances or mergers? Should the missions be identical? Similar? Completely different? The question matters when you consider the nonprofit hierarchy in figure 1.0. If you get mission wrong, the ship is sunk.

Have you ever been in a meeting and though everyone is using your language, everything seems foreign and unintelligible? Maybe it is your first day at a new firm and none of the acronyms or terms make any sense, or the meeting is just run differently, or nobody participates the way you are used to. Often, we think of culture in terms of nationality or ethnicity, but organizations have culture too…

It was painfully hot in Phoenix, Arizona the day I locked our office doors for the last time. In the short span of 30 days I had laid off 50 staff, sold as many chairs, desktop computers, staplers (I still have one), and wound down the operation of my first real leadership job. It was a brutal ending to my role as Vice President of Client Services for a consumer credit counseling nonprofit start up.