Gerty The Micro-Managing Board Member

Gerty, that was her nickname, looked at the financial report and saw that Cynthia Dickson, the CEO of the Turn Around human services charity, had spent yet another $1000 on office furniture for the fledgling charity. Now in its seventh year, Turn Around was finding money hard to come by and here was another useless expense for something they didn’t need. And why was it, Gerty wondered, that Cynthia hadn’t brought this to the board’s attention before she went out and bought those file cabinets? Honestly, what was this charity coming to anyway?

She had, in this flagrant violation of the unspoken behavior code, just one more proof, as if she needed any, that Cynthia was just not capable of running Turn Around. From the very beginning, Gertrude Steinman knew that her former high school rival on the cheerleading squad couldn’t run that charity. Even in the interviews, as a member of the search committee, Gerty had told herself that Cynthia should be stopped in her tracks. But the other board members had fallen for Cynthia’s line and were so enthusiastic about her education, experience and ability, that Gerty didn’t dare speak against her no matter how she felt.

Then, during one of the first board meetings after she had become Turn Around’s new CEO, Cynthia had made the mistake of allowing the board to review her financial plan for the year. Gerty saw her chance, dived in, and never let go. Over the past three years, she had repeatedly questioned all the major expenses and many of the minor ones every time a financial report was given to the board. Slowly, she hoped, she was building the case against Cynthia that would one day see her thrown out of that position and dumped unceremoniously on the streets of the community without a flashy CEO’s job, and that would be all to the good.

“Bob,” she addressed the board president, “I just don’t see why we have to be spending $1000 on file cabinets when we have much more need in creating programs for these children. How can we go to the public and ask for funds when we have these kinds of priorities? It makes us look bad and our cost for administration is now up to at least 11 cents on the dollar. Isn’t that too high? We really should conserve all our revenue for use in our programs. These kinds of expenses are, well, rather frivolous, if you ask me.”

“But we had to have those file cabinets,” Cynthia chimed in. “Otherwise where would we put all the records and files? We can’t run the programs without adequate storage. It’s not an exorbitant expense in a budget of a half million dollars, and we recently received federal guidelines that indicated we’re well within their parameters for administrative expenses. I don’t’ see what the problem is here.”

“Besides,” said Arthur Means, the treasurer, and a community leader who ran the village’s long-established accounting firm, “what’s a few bucks for office furniture when you need the stuff to function?” He was tired of Gerty’s continually raising problematic issues he saw as unimportant for the board’s consideration. He was much more interested in trying to raise the funds they needed to put the budget ahead.

We'll let the Board continue to stew over this little problem, and rejoin them tomorrow morning.