‘What Are We Doing?’: Questions Posed by Carnegie’s President

In the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s 1997 annual report, Vartan Gregorian, the foundation’s president, outlined some of his thoughts as he undertook an intensive review of the organization’s grant-making priorities. Following are excerpts:

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Some of the questions I have posed to my colleagues and the trustees are: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How well are we doing it, especially in relation to the work of other foundations? How does it serve Carnegie Corporation’s overall mission to advance and diffuse knowledge and understanding?

Does the Corporation perceive itself as an incubator of ideas or as a sustainer of institutions that play that role? How do we combat the age-old problem of scatteration in our grant making, while retaining the flexibility to respond to a tantalizing idea or a target of opportunity?

How do we evaluate our programs? Is there merit in recognizing the “illuminating failure” as well as the obvious success, in order to learn lessons from experience? Would we achieve our objectives more efficiently if we made fewer grants and larger commitments or many more little ones? If we know what our entry strategy is, what will be our exit strategy? How can we intelligently and imaginatively harness technological progress in order to achieve our goals? How effectively, in the electronic age, is the Corporation reaching its various audiences and constituencies?

Finally, what are some important new issues facing our nation and the world that we should deal with? Where is our comparative leadership advantage?

Should we “go it alone” as we often have in the past or increasingly seek partners? How do we achieve the right balance between continuity and change?

This last question is crucial, because I do not believe we should engage in change for change’s sake: as we consider new initiatives, we may well reaffirm the importance of some of the paths already taken, only adjusting the emphasis somewhat. …

Andrew Carnegie’s practice from the time he was in business was to find the talented individual and give him or her what was needed. But how does a foundation go about identifying the talent and know what that person needs? And then, how is a foundation to be protected from the danger of making arbitrary decisions?

How do the staff and trustees go about exercising intelligent judgment as to which of many competing fields of activity should be continued, which ones have reached the area of diminishing returns, and which new fields should be entered? And how do we insure the highest quality of the work that we fund?

These are among the many questions that [Frederick] Keppel [president of the Carnegie Corporation from 1923 to 1941] raised that are as nettlesome in our time as they were in his. There are, moreover, many other causes falling within our charter that are not devoted directly to the advancement of learning but to social purposes, the testing of ideas in demonstrations and experiments, the synthesis and consolidation of existing knowledge, popular education to raise the level of public understanding, and advocacy of specific causes.

As Keppel noted, there are always many more projects to be fostered, many more individuals to be helped, than there are resources at hand to provide for them.

The keys to our future success, therefore, will be selection and selectivity, priority setting with a keen sense of the entering wedge into problems, knowledge of where and how to capture the best talent, and the formation of alliances — not just co-investment but real partnerships undertaken in the spirit of true collegiality. Carnegie Corporation can play its part in such alliances, not only with our sister organizations in the field, but with other institutions as well.