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February 15, 2006, at 4:45 p.m.
University Events Room
Glickman Family Library, 7th floor
Portland USM Campus (map)

Click here to watch the video clip of the colloquium (140.04 MB)

Many organizations struggle to do two things simultaneously—fulfilling their missions while creating effective and efficient back office systems.  Exercising leadership is the key to success—managers must challenge the organizational cultures that prevent them from implementing solutions.  The paper offers several recommendations following an approach based on a systems dynamics model:
- Leaders in small nonprofits need to come to grips with the realities
facing their organizations, and they must do so before a challenge reaches crisis proportions.
- Leaders must help subordinates and stakeholders learn these lessons, so that they are more like to make the necessary changes.
- Next, the nonprofit organization’s members and stakeholders need to learn that short-term pain will, in the long term, make them better able to deliver services—perhaps in greater quantity and with greater quality than ever before.
- Leaders should involve the rank-and-file heavily in the change process. When leaders wait until challenges hit with full force, then radical change, implemented very quickly, becomes preferable to moderate or even fast change; in this case, gains in efficiency and capability are greater than when a leader changes more slowly.

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John J. Voyer is Professor of Business Administration at the School of Business of the University of Southern Maine, and currently serves as the School’s interim dean. He teaches courses in strategy, organization theory and change, system dynamics, and strategic management of technology and innovation.

A frequent adviser to public and private concerns, Professor Voyer is an author of several books, monographs and journal articles and serves as a reviewer for a number of academic journals and conferences. Dr. Voyer has held the titles of Libra Distinguished Professor of Business (1995-1997), Price-Babson Fellow (2000) and Sam Walton Fellow (2003). He has participated (2003) and taught (2005) in the program on the Art and Practice of Leadership Development at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

He earned a B.A. from Harvard University in 1973, an MBA from Clark University in 1981, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Massachusetts in 1986.

The colloquium is sponsored by the L.L. Bean/Lee Surace Endowed Chair in Accounting.

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USM Professor Jeffrey Gramlich was appointed the first L.L. Bean/Lee Surace Chair in Accounting in the USM School of Business in 2003. His appointment was made possible by a $1 million gift from L.L. Bean, Inc., its board chair, Leon Gorman, his wife Lisa, Jim and Maureen Gorman, and Tom Gorman, who established the chair in memory of L.L. Bean CFO Lee Surace '73, '81, who died in March of 2001. Surace was chair of the USM School of Business' Advisory Council and was a frequent guest lecturer.

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