What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Perhaps not every high-powered, high-profile executive who’s recently given up a lucrative career to place his (they’re mostly his, it seems) talents in the service of the voluntary sector may attest to that motivation.

But sure it is, we’ve got some real winners on our side in the past few years.

A short list, and there are probably many others, includes:

Paul Alofs, President and CEO, the Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation; Mike Russill, President and CEO, World Wildlife Fund Canada; Rick Blickstead, Chief Executive Officer, The Wellesley Institute; Rocco Rossi, Chief Executive Officer, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario; Michael Howlett, President and CEO, Canadian Diabetes Association; Georgina Steinsky Schwartz, President and CEO, Imagine Canada; Dave Wolfenden, Executive Director, Outward Bound; Kal Tobias, Chief Executive Officer, Altruvest Charitable Services.

What drives them? The motivations are surely as numerous as the individuals, but probably have in common some of that “give back” need that characterizes most of our volunteers. Very often, as well, some personal experience with the charity itself or the cause it represents accounts for some of the attraction.

Paul Alofs, for example, formerly with Colgate-Palmolive, HMV Music Stores, BMG Music Canada, Disney Stores, and MP3.com, returned to Canada after selling his stock in the latter to care for his mother through her breast cancer ordeal.

“My mother’s illness was a life-altering experience,” he told the Globe and Mail shortly after he joined the Foundation in 2003. “When I thought about returning to work full-time, I looked at a bunch of things in the private sector, but decided I would only do something if my heart was in it.:“

Two of the new leadership team he has drawn to the organization also have had personal experiences with cancer, these being Lynn Douglas, Vice-President Community Programs, and Christine Lasky, Vice-President Strategic Initiatives.

“Like just about everybody in our organization, both of them have direct family experience with cancer. Our vision is to conquer cancer and both of them felt at this stage of their careers that trying to do something to further that vision and support the cause was what they wanted to do. Both of them were very successful and very well paid. Both of them took a pay cut to come here and I think it’s the fact that they can actually contribute to a team that is accomplishing things in the fight to conquer cancer that attracted them.”

This move out of the rat race into the world of the meaningful is definitely a trend, Alofs believes. There is a need for talented people to generate wealth for the sake of society as a whole and the nonprofit sector in particular, he says, and there will always be those who are motivated by the desire to build their own success and a profitable career. Greed will always be good for some people.

“But I think a lot of very talented people are looking at their career, looking for a cause that really motivates them,” he says. “The huge attraction of the nonprofit sector is that you can work for a cause that’s meaningful to you and improve the world in some way.”

Changes at the foundation that reflect his business background and experience include, he says, that it has become more business-like and outcomes-based. It makes heavy use of transactional businesses like its lotteries, which are “the largest source of funds for cancer research in Canada”.

The foundation’s fundraising and investment income, at $77 million, represents a high return per its 45 FTE employees, he says, because many of its activities are outsourced, such as the lotteries, the Weekend to End Breast Cancer, advertising, marketing, and direct response.

The private and nonprofit sectors can learn from each other, says Alofs. Nonprofits can borrow some of business’s best practices in areas like governance and performance models. But they must be careful that these practices never endanger the essential cause which is the organization’s raison d’etre. “Mission and vision are always the most important.”

On the other side, he notes, smart CEOs in private business will ally their company with a cause that is appropriate to their corporate mission and find that this alliance motivates employees much more than just generating dollars and market share.

Another executive with his eye firmly on the mission is Mike Russill at WWF, whose involvement in the cause of protecting the environment was seeded early in his business career, grew to become a passion, and then the cause of his taking the helm of the Fund.

Having worked at Shell Canada and Petro-Canada, as an executive at Suncor Inc. he was instrumental in the company’s introduction of ethanol gasoline, the first company to do so and still maintaining a standard higher than the provincially mandated level.

He got his first lessons in the value and benefits of extensive stakeholder consultation – and its potential as a contributor to the bottom line – there as well. Suncor was able to bypass government hearings into its plans for the oil sands because through consultation it had already met everyone’s demands for its environmental responsibility, thus enabling it to start up a year early and steal a march on the competition.

Similarly, when the company was expanding its service stations and adding car washes, in each location it consulted extensively with the neighbours and met any objections they might have, thus avoiding any Ontario Municipal Board hearings, always time-consuming and costly.

Joining the board of directors of Nature Conservancy Canada during this period, he says he “became more and more interested in conservation and the environment, and I started to understand how businesses could in fact have a positive impact while doing business – it wasn’t a question of either/or, it was a question of ‘and’.”

Seeing an opportunity for business to “make a big statement, to help with climate change, and to make a significant impact from the point of view of both species and spaces”, he left Suncor and founded Aadco Automotive, the first ecologically sensitive automobile recycling company in Canada, which was awarded the Eco Logo. 

Following what he describes as “a very intense review process”, during which he and WWF really got to know each other well and identified that their objectives gibed, he says “the more I got involved, the more excited I got because the things it needed as an organization were very much along the lines of things I could bring to it.”

Those “things”, he says, are very much needed in the nonprofit sector these days. Although many institutions, especially the larger ones, are often run by the experts in their field – hospitals by doctors, universities by academics, environmental organizations by scientists – they really need direction from professional managers and leaders.

“NGOs these days need to be run as professional enterprises,” he contends. “They need good branding, they need good strategic plans, they need to speak the language of business, they need to have solid development for their employees.”

When he joined WWF in 2004, Russill found himself faced with two major – but related – challenges. The organization had plateaued from a fundraising point of view, while expenses continued to rise, partly at least because of the second problem, that its brand, while “extraordinarily powerful internationally”, was perceived as very narrow, ie people only knew WWF for its protection of endangered species.

“I looked at it as a large house with lots of rooms, but only one narrow door. If people came in through the door of endangered species, they found we were in marine, we were in forestry, we were in healthy oceans, toxics, climate change ... all that,” he says.

“What we needed to do was put in more doors and windows, get people to perceive us as a broader, global conservation organization.”

The organization also needed a new, broader strategic plan, and is about to adopt same, says Russill, and it has been working to bring in high potential employees with both business backgrounds as well as conservation experience or science degrees, as well as training existing employees in leadership skills.

It’s also reaching out to the business community, whose language it now speaks more fluently, consulting with companies on how they can (a) reduce their own ecological footprint, and (b) develop products and services which help their customers reduce their footprints. And, of course, the suggestion is always there that one way to help the ecology is to contribute financially to WWF’s work in that regard.

In fundraising, the organization has been adding to its capacity in planned giving, reaching out more to financial and wealth management advisers, preparing brochures and adding material to its web site to encourage people to think of WWF in their estate planning, and also increasing its stewardship of legacy donors.

It has also developed a young donors’ group, Green Carpet Series, to reach out to the one demographic it felt it was missing, young professionals who are interested in philanthropy and in environmental causes.

Speaking as a representative of the new breed of businesspeople opting for new careers in nonprofit work, Russill says money (personal compensation) is unlikely to be an issue. “The driving force is to be able to use the experience and skills that you’ve gained from 25 or 30 years in business and the challenge is to translate those skills into enhancing the strategic potential of the not-for-profit business.”

The litmus test of difference between the two career environments, he says, is that in business the leaders are always challenged to motivate their employees, make them want to get up in the morning and come to work because they think it’s important and valuable to do the job they’ve been assigned.

“Here I found it really wasn’t an issue,” he says. “People in WWF have aligned their lifestyle and their life’s work. So when they get out of bed in the morning, they say ‘hot damn, I’m going to save the world today’.”

Rick Blickstead has recently established an organization of individuals who have moved from the private sector to nonprofit positions, a migration they term “moving from success to significance”.

This is not to imply, he says, that the private sector does not have people of significance, “but rather to underscore that these people were highly motivated by creating positive social change; what drove them primarily was the double bottom line of financial stability AND social change significance.”

With a broad range of experience in many corporations in both the US and Canada, including Wal-Mart, Holt Renfrew and Wellesley Hospital, Blickstead says “I moved to the NFP because I wanted to make a difference on a larger scale as well as use private sector learning to help the sector become more effective and efficient.”

Concurrently, he notes, “I also wanted to engage in reciprocal capacity building by learning how the NFP world can improve the private sector – the process, passion and ability to do a dollar’s worth of work with 50 cents is something the private sector could dramatically learn from the NFP.”

(For more on Blickstead’s views on the differences between the two sectors, see the report on his presentation to the Greater Toronto Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, CF December 15, 2005, www.canadianfundraiser.com/newsletter/article.asp?ArticleID=1826.)

A previous owner of Preston Group of Companies and most recently President and Chief Executive Officer of Howlett Holdings, Michael Howlett had concerns when he joined the Canadian Diabetes Association in 2003 that he might turn things around in a few months and work himself out of a job.

It wasn’t quite as simple as all that (are we surprised?), but he did de-silo the organization, uniting its departments, hired two new vice-presidents to beef up marketing and fundraising, and helped avert a financial problem.

Adjustment to his gung-ho business style, for both staff and directors, took some doing, he recalls, but eventually the styles meshed for the good of the organization.

Rocco Rossi comes from a high-powered background at MGI Software, NPV Associates, Labatt Interview, and the Toronto Star, and served on a variety of nonprofit boards, including the United Way of Greater Toronto, before joining the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Obviously a believer in hands-on fundraising despite his lofty position, Rossi this summer raised $150,000 for his organization by kayaking 480 km from Toronto to Ottawa, celebrating the announcement of a $5 million investment from the provincial government to the Heart and Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery. He is also an executive driven to his new career by personal experience with the cause, in this case his family’s experience with stroke over two generations.

Georgina Steinsky Schwartz, of course, is no stranger to these “pages”, having taken over the revamped Imagine Canada in 2004 following a career which included several years with the federal government before taking senior executive positions with Bata Shoe Corporation, Manulife Financial, and Bell Canada. She feels this background enables her to bring a combination of strategy, structure and discipline to her leadership position in the voluntary sector.

Dave Wolfenden is a little different, in that he began his career with Outward Bound as an instructor, then worked as a teacher, management consultant, and in real estate management before returning to this first love in 2004, as Executive Director with the organization.

“I was volunteering on a few nonprofit boards in Scottsdale and it reminded me how much this kind of work means to me,” he says. “There’s more balance between the meaning and the money equation,” even though he says he works twice as hard now as he did in business.

Kal Tobias of Altruvest is the latest crossover import to the voluntary sector, having been named CEO this past March. He is not new to the sector, however, having been President and Chief Executive Officer of the Childhood Cancer Foundation-Candlelighters Canada after serving with DHL Canada for more than 19 years, latterly as President and CEO. He was most recently Managing Director of VoicePrint Canada, a national reading service for the blind.

His move into the nonprofit sector, originally with Candlelight, was typically motivated by personal experience, in that he lost his wife to cancer some time ago. “This move into the charitable sector gave me the opportunity to work on a variety of challenging and stimulating projects," he says. "It also allowed me to build hope for those suffering from this dread disease.”

Although most of those who have made the transition say money is not their prime motivator, Anne Fawcett, Managing Partner, Caldwell Partners International, notes that in some cases, at least, "what makes this [influx of professional managers] possible is that, over the last 15 years or so, we have had very good stock market periods, and company pension plans have been great asset builders, so that many people are able to afford to make this sort of life/career decision.”

She points out also that “virtually everyone who has made this transition had a rich volunteer leadership life concurrent with their business career, so they gravitated to a place where they were experiencing greater rewards for their efforts, and missions to which they related strongly.”

And it still does represent a challenge, reminds Ann Armstrong, Director, Social Enterprise Initiative, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto: “The transition from for-profit to nonprofit is harder than it seems. Working in the nonprofit sector is complex because of its multiple bottom lines, its multiple stakeholders, and its governance process. To make the transition, for-profit executives have to see with new eyes.”