I just want to give due recognition to the importance of knowing which people make an organizational decision, which was very well articulated in Light’s book, which I cited there in footnote 14. In Growth through Governance I teach the idea of organizational decisions — decisions that belong to an organization, not to any one individual. I think the example I gave, of the dinner party, is sufficient to show that organizational decisions exist. If you and I join President Obama for dinner, and the three of us have a discussion about whether we’d prefer pastrami sandwiches, enchiladas or Korean barbecue, then whatever decision we make will belong not to any particular one of us, but to our dinner party corporately. The joint decision creates an organization around it, if the organization wasn’t there before. This is not very different from the way in which most nonprofit organizations emerge by having a meeting of people and voting themselves into existence.

But to underscore Light’s emphasis on the people behind decisions, I mention my undergraduate first-year advisor, Prof. Larry Bacow, who went on to serve as Chancellor of MIT and President of Tufts University. Larry would critique what he called the “talking building syndrome”: the idea that “MIT decided,” or “the City of Boston decided” this or that. Larry would point students to the importance, for being effective in organizations, of pinpointing how and by whom those decisions emerge.

Neither side of this dialogue is wrong. Both sides are right. In Growth through Governance I concentrate on organizational decisions, about which you’ll see even more in Chapter 3. But let’s not discount the need to know which people are behind which organizational decisions, and why.