How the Ford Foundation Should Select a New Leader

Wanted: a Rolls-Royce at Ford.

The search for a new president of the Ford Foundation is under way, stimulating discussions of possible new directions and priorities for the second-wealthiest grant maker in the United States. As rumors of candidates are floated, many observers have become uneasy about the future of this mainstay of American philanthropy.

Ford has a long history making grants to a wide range of causes. Many of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s gained their momentum and legitimacy as a result of Ford financing. Organizations led by minorities got their start with help from the foundation, as did legal-services groups, environmental organizations, women’s projects, and community-development corporations. Cultural organizations and educational institutions have also been the recipients of Ford largess over the years. For them, and other nonprofit groups as well, what happens at Ford is of paramount importance. The stakes in the choice of a new president couldn’t be higher.

That is also true of the foundation world at large, a rapidly growing constellation of more than 100,000 institutions that is devoid of leadership — people and organizations with the vision, toughness, diplomacy, and courage to deal with the problems facing the nonprofit world, transcend the self-interest of their own institutions, and inspire colleagues to join in efforts to overhaul how foundations work. This is a tall order, and one that the Ford Foundation in recent years has failed to provide.

While its grant making has varied from mediocre to spectacular, the foundation has been consistent in having little or no impact on professional philanthropy.

Susan V. Berresford, who is retiring next year as president of Ford, has been tenacious in leading the big grant makers in their battle to prevent Congress from increasing the portion of assets foundations are required to distribute to charity each year. That is a misguided effort, given that foundations are now required to distribute only 5 percent a year — and much of that money is legally allowed to go to administrative costs, not grants, so it is a small sum compared with philanthropic assets.

But more disturbing is that Ford’s voice has been silent, or at best faint, on many important issues. Foundations need to increase general operating support, provide more money for advocacy activities and efforts to influence public policy, create more resources for nonprofit groups in rural areas and other regions that have few foundations of their own, foster greater openness and public accountability, improve donor-grantee relationships, link their investments to their missions, and democratize philanthropy.

Ford now has the opportunity to grasp the mantle of leadership that the foundation world so desperately needs.

In its search, Ford should pay close attention to the experience of other large foundations that have undergone similar transitions during the past decade.

In many cases, the big foundations have failed to recruit or attract people who possess vision, courage, and an acute understanding of both nonprofit organizations and the most salient policy issues of our democracy, preferring instead to settle for people with established professional credentials who were safe, risk-adverse, and comfortable with the elitism of philanthropic institutions.

Too many foundation leaders have been college presidents or academic scholars whose experiences do not often reflect much of a sense of low-income and working-class constituencies, or the need for speaking out on public policy and taking risks.

Much of the responsibility for re-energizing our democracy and civil society in the coming decades will fall on nonprofit organizations, and foundations will have to finance and sustain much of this effort. How many foundation CEO’s have demonstrated the capacity and will to carry this burden? Unfortunately, we have had plenty of smart executives but few leaders.

The process used to select foundation presidents has frequently been marred by two major factors.

The first is the lens through which foundation boards view potential candidates.

Their boards, for the most part, are composed of wealthy individuals, highly paid professionals, corporate executives, well-known educators, and socially prominent citizens who tend to prefer applicants who look and feel like the trustees and who are part of their social and professional circles. They seem to like candidates who are “get along” types, not aggressive people who want to try innovative ideas and explore new frontiers. Often people who push boundaries are seen as troublesome. Big names also have a special cachet for these board members.

The second impediment to an enlightened selection process has been the tendency of search firms to present to a foundation’s selection committee and board only those candidates they think will be credentialed and safe enough to pass muster.

They have frequently filtered out distinguished applicants, anticipating that such people would not be acceptable to the board, rather than permitting the board to decide on the candidates’ suitability.

The lessons from previous searches for foundation CEO’s are clear. Neither the social and professional biases of the board nor those of the search firm should be permitted to interfere in the selection of a creative, visionary, and energetic potential leader who could do a great job running the King Kong of foundations.

Once a selection is made, Ford could also learn from some of the mistakes made during other foundations’ transition periods.

In numerous cases, a combination of board compliance or complicity, personal egos, and the failure to understand the traditions of the foundation has prompted a new CEO to act injudiciously by rashly abandoning a set of priorities and track record that had distinguished the foundation’s grant making and helped build the capacity of its grantees to carry out their missions.

A case in point: Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, decided last year to eliminate its cultural and arts program, called by some the most effective in the history of philanthropy. Equally shortsighted was the decision by the Northwest Area Foundation several years ago to stop supporting all its grass-roots grantees in a region where little other support was available in order to devote all of the foundation’s money to comprehensive, long-term antipoverty efforts in a handful of communities.

The installation of new CEO’s at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffmann Foundation resulted in the termination of programs that had been not only stellar but also enormously important to the communities they served. The boards of those foundations apparently went along with the decisions made by new chief executives.

We can expect that new foundation chief executives will want to place their imprimatur on the institutions they have just joined, but such an endeavor should be a deliberative process over time, taking into account the history, traditions, responsibilities, and impact of their foundations. Foundation executives can be creative and risk taking without throwing out time-tested priorities and programs.

Excellence in grant making, not making a name for themselves, should be their goal. The boards should make certain that the best of the past is retained, not immediately replaced by new priorities and programs in the name of trendiness. The Ford trustees should keep this principle in mind as they choose their next CEO.

There was a time from the 1960s through the early 1980s when the Ford Foundation could rightfully boast that it had by far the best staff in the foundation world: David Bell, William Carmichael, Harold (Doc) Howe II, W. McNeil Lowry, Waldemar Nielsen, Robert Schrank, Mitchell Sviridoff, Louis Winnick, Paul Ylvisaker, and many others. They were bright, creative, and outspoken individuals who had their own constituencies and exerted enormous influence in their respective fields.

McGeorge Bundy, president of the foundation from 1966 to 1979, wasn’t reluctant to hire the best and brightest people available.

The foundation once again will have the opportunity to build the finest staff in the business. The board needs to select a president who is intellectually confident and is not afraid to surround herself or himself with outstanding executives and program officers. Ideally, the new CEO will also want to renew the fellowship program to train young potential foundation leaders that the foundation foolishly terminated a couple of years ago.

The foundation has had a glorious history of accomplishment. It must build on this solid foundation to forge an even greater philanthropic future. But it will not be able to do so without selecting a visionary, savvy, and courageous leader. Ford needs to hire a RollsRoyce type of CEO. Nobody else will suffice.

Pablo Eisenberg, a regular contributor to these pages, is senior fellow at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute. His e-mail address is pseisenberg@erols.com.