Mission JR Haeck Governance Consulting facilitates improved effectiveness and efficiency in NFP boards and their members by helping boards of directors to intentionally and knowledgably balance strategic organizational purpose with legal, ethical and practical parameters, stimulating innovative thinking, and inspiring passionate resolve through a spectrum of group leadership offerings and publications that throttles the hope in each volunteer's heart and engages the intelligence in each leader's mind to optimize service to a worthwhile mission.

Vision JR Haeck Governance Consulting recognizes that effective and efficient governance;

• Lies at the heart of peoples' desires to positively impact our local and global communities,
• Requires the exercise of consistent patterns of workable deliberation and decision-making,
• Intentionally and knowledgeably balances competing objectives and constraints,
• Actively and purposely involves a healthy process of innovative thinking, and
• Works best when driven by passionate resolve, and moderated by conscious and intelligent compromise.

Heart The collective desire to positively impact one's community supersedes the desire for personal profit.  When properly engaged, the passion that an organization embraces in its mission contagiously infects constituents sufficient to engender collective sacrifice on behalf of a common purpose.  Governance must reflect this passion and intelligently harness it so that constituent sacrifices entrusted to its leadership are not wasted, but are effectively leveraged towards purposeful benefit in ways that no single individual could accomplish individually.

Consistent Patterns Effective governance requires that boards exercise consistent patterns of workable deliberation and decision-making.  This means that deliberation and decision-making should proceed neither erratically nor hastily.  Boards should reflect an image of steady hands on a steering wheel.  Since group thought processes and decisions naturally stimulate differences of opinion, consistent process must provide balance to intelligent thought.  It must also assure that over time, the collective wisdom of multiple perspectives will yield better direction than that of the most intelligent of individuals.

Balance A well-run organization requires proper balance between seeking to achieve worthwhile objectives and proceeding with due caution and respect for risk.  Like an automobile, organizational control requires both an accelerator and a brake.  The accelerator must be engaged in order to achieve a desired destination.  The brake must be applied in order to constrain purposeful energy so that a desired destination can be achieved safely and reliably.

Healthy Process A healthy process of governance will actively and purposely stimulate innovative thinking.  Therefore, this process must encourage independent thinking and the expression of original ideas, even when they run counter to management advice, other board members' opinions, and conventional thought.  The process must encourage and tolerate patience in all discussion and debate so that no action is ever taken without encouraging active independent thinking and tolerating differences in ideas.

Passion and Compromise Finally, good governance perpetuates and harnesses passion from its leaders and various constituencies on behalf of organizational purpose.  It extends beyond the assembly and utilization of intelligent and well-connected individuals.  Fully effective leaders in governance must be motivated by heart-felt burning to achieve organizational purpose, as articulated by the organization's mission statement.  But beyond this burning passion, each leader, and all leaders collectively, must understand and accept the fact that the nature of group decision making will require compromise or rejection of individual opinions and directional preferences from time to time.  Therefore, humility must accompany every board member's ego.  Each must accept the concept that group decision making provides a necessary balance to individual thinking, even though poor group decisions sometimes result.  Intelligent and persuasive debate, which is the responsibility of all board members, constitutes the necessary antidote to poor group decision making.