NAMI 2007 Convention: Interview with Lynn Borton

Lynn Borton 

This is number four in a series of seven blogs made possible by the encouragement and financial support of The HealthCentral Network. All represent interviews with senior officers of NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness] or other luminaries that attended the NAMI 2007 annual convention. These interviews cover a wide range of topics that should be of interest to everyone that is involved in one fashion or another with mental health issues.

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Lynn Borton is the Chief Operating Officer of NAMI. She first joined the organization over 20 years ago and has served in a wide variety of roles including program planning and development. Among many other things, she has been involved in NAMI's strategic planning process since 2001 and was the driving force behind their new 2007 - 2010 strategic plan. Previously, Ms. Borton was with the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston.

During my corporate career, among other things, I often had the ultimate responsibility for a multi-national strategic planning function. I know first hand how critical a strategic plan is to building and sustaining a successful, dynamic organization. The strategic planning process requires unfettered brainstorming, defining a clear vision or mission, assessing strengths and weaknesses accurately (including those of competitors), setting quantifiable goals and related strategies, establishing action plans with time lines, assigning responsibilities for the completion of these, as well as budgeting for and obtaining essential resources of all types as needed. It is also important to prepare contingency plans with specific trigger points that will set these alternate approaches in motion. Equally important, it requires building alignment at all levels of the organization to successfully implement the plan and realize the vision. Ironically, if everyone in a dynamic organization is truly engaged, a good strategic plan is never "completed;" it continues to undergo change to meet an ever changing environment.

Given all the above, I was naturally quite curious about the strategic planning process at NAMI, a non-profit, grass roots organization which encompasses fifty largely autonomous state organizations, over 1,100 local affiliates and 220,000 members, an organization in which most of the work is done by unpaid volunteers. In my experience, I never had to tackle the development of a strategic plan with such a wide range of constituents, each with their own ideas, desires, needs, and problems.

To find out more about it, I was fortunate to talk with Ms. Borton. In her role as NAMI's Chief Operating Officer, Lynn wears several hats and, as noted above, was instrumental in developing the organization's new three-year strategic plan, which was released earlier this year. Through an intensive and comprehensive planning process, NAMI has established ambitious goals and has made the commitment to move from being a good, solid organization to one that is truly great. Their strategic plan defines "great" to mean that..." NAMI will deliver superior performance that makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time".