Distinctive Competency - Session 2

I was really struck by the term distinctive competency in this week's class/readings. It seemed an excellent point to me that an organization should only do things in which it has a distinct advantage over its competitors. It caused me to reflect on both my work at NYU and on Malawi Children's Village.

NYU's Office of Global Programs competes against other schools and third party study abroad providers to recruit students for our study abroad programs. I think we have some clear distinctive competencies. One is that our programs are academically rigorous and offer students to get credit from a fairly prestigious institution while studying abroad. Another is that we make it very easy for students to study abroad. Our study abroad counselors walk students through the visa process, we provide pre departure orientations, and have well staffed academic centers abroad that help meet students needs. We are able to do these things because we don't try to compete in other areas. Our programs are very expensive; we do not try to compete on cost. We limit our study abroad sites to major world cities so that we can be assured of getting high quality faculty and offering our students lots of services. NYU will not attempt to run a program in a small city in a developing country, because that would not utilize our distinctive competencies.

Malawi Children's Village (MCV) on the other hand does not have clearly defined distinctive competencies. I think that our village volunteer program has the potential to give us a distinctive competency, but I don't know that it is easily defined anymore. It gave us an advantage in delivering village based care, but how does it give us an advantage in running a school or health clinic. If it doesn't give these programs a distinctive competency, what does? I'm not sure I could say, and I think this is a clear sign that our organization is in need of more strategic planning. In our newsletter last year we had a volunteer that was quoted as saying "MCV is great because it is so many things." Since we help with food, health care, and education we try to meet all of the needs of our orphans. Perhaps this comprehensive approach is our distinctive competency, but I think that it's a bit of a stretch. I think that I will be bringing this up at our next board meeting as the fact that we don't have clear distinctive competencies seems a big problem to me.