The title says it all in David La Piana and Michaela Hayes' Play to Win: The Nonprofit Guide to Competitive Strategy.  Whether they recognize it or not, these authors write, nonprofit organizations compete with one another for clients, staff, funds and media attention despite the collaborative and often anti-competitive ethos that pervades nonprofit culture.  The sooner they recognize and address this dimension of their work the better off they and the communities they serve will be.

The book begins with background on why nonprofits often fail to embrace the competitive dimensions of their work and instead choose to focus attention on forming collaborative relationships.  The authors roll out the usual suspects here including an overall orientation towards inclusiveness and sharing and an antithesis to values normally associated with the marketplace whose spillover 'bads'― inequality, poverty, lack of opportunity―  they seek to mitigate.  La Piana and Hayes point out as well that collaboration is often something foisted on nonprofit organizations by the foundations and governmental entities that fund them.

While noting some of the benefits of collaboration and pointing out circumstances where it can be appropriate, La Pina and Hayes spend one chapter of the book describing the costs of collaboration, both to non-profits and to the communities they serve.  Some, such as the drain on staff time and administrative resources are easy to accept.  As the authors  point out, nonprofits sometimes create a 'collaborative layer' within their organizations that can dilute the attention available to clients and services.  More challenging to the communitarian ethos of the independent sector is their assertion that a focus on inclusion and collaboration may lead to a mis-appropriation of resources away from the most capable organizations “while bringing to the table relatively little of unique value.”  As in the for-profit sphere, they argue, competition fosters efficiency and the optimal allocation of resources.

Whatever one makes of their rationale for competition, the majority of the book's ten chapters are practically oriented and focus on assessing an organization's competitive position and developing competitive strategies for improving it.  More than exhortations, these chapters offer hands on help and include handy forms and grids with which to begin the process.  The approach they take to both organizational analysis and strategic planning is based on detailed comparisons between the presenting organization and other organizations that provide the same or similar services in the community.  Such an approach compels those doing the analysis to really drill down and enumerate in detail their organization's relative strengths and weaknesses. As a practical matter, I'm not sure most EDs or their staffs will have the time or the access to the necessary information about their competitors to do this.  Yet as a heuristic device La Pina and Hayes are right on target.  In other words, use the competitive analysis approach the authors advocate (and the multitude of excellent worksheets they provide) to drill down to the details and identify benchmarks of organizational strength and weakness but accept that you may not be able to be as specific in your competitive analysis as the authors are in their examples.

The final chapters are about competitive strategy.  Here the authors show how to use the competitive analysis completed in the prior section to design a program for organizational improvement.  Again, its all about drilling down to the details.  Find the area you have a weakness, staffing for example, and specify in detail, the nature of the weakness.  Let's take staffing as an example.  Are you having trouble recruiting new staff or are you loosing existing staff?  If the latter, is salary the issue? Working conditions? Scheduling?  The idea is that in the analysis phase of the process you've done all the ground work identifying all your competitive challenges and therefore have the ability to be very specific as you search for solutions.  At the same time, you've identified those of your competitors that are doing better in that area and have developed an understanding of why their practices are more successful.  La Pina and Hayes' suggest modeling changes in your organization around these practices.

The value of La Pina and Hayes' work lies first in the specific tools and techniques they provide for conducting a competitive analysis.  Even though many non-profit leaders will find it difficult to conduct the kind of analyses they recommend, their drill down to the details approach calls attention to the importance of well founded benchmarks against which to measure organizational strength.  More than that, they provide a useful methodology for establishing and utilizing such benchmarks.  Play to Win's main contribution to the literature however is the justification it provides for framing nonprofit work in competitive terms.  While the authors rightly point out that competition within the sector need not follow the cut throat, take no prisoners model so prevalent in the private sector, non-profits clearly do compete and such competition strengthens the community and leads to better service outcomes for those the sector aims to help.