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Learnings
Foundations are far from alone in their fascination with LEARNINGS, the plural form of a noun meaning "something learned." It is certainly correct to use the word as a noun, though the usage is still uncommon outside of business schools, consulting firms, and (lately) foundations. The popularity of the word derives from the equally popular phrase LEARNING ORGANIZATION, which burst noisily upon the management consulting scene in the late 1980s, championed by organizational theorist Peter Senge, among others. Effective organizations, the doctrine goes, are those that constantly incorporate what they learn (their LEARNINGS) into making better products, improving production methods, and generally understanding their customers and competitors better.
On the substantive merits of this idea, we can maintain a respectful silence. (We are not about to cast our lot with those luddites who ran the world before 1985, when everyone presumably believed that organizations should bar the gates to any information they did not already possess.) The trouble with LEARNINGS is not its substance but its form. Apart from being insistently trendy, the word's main offense is that, most of the time, it's just a needlessly exotic euphemism for the common terms "information" and "knowledge." Yet LEARNINGS tantalizingly seems to connote something more than those other words, some deeper meaning, which often fails to materialize.
"The Foundation will document our learnings from this grant," says one perfectly ordinary memo. What does that mean, on close inspection? It implies that we don't simply want to record what happened when we made Grant X, but more impressively, we want to document our learnings about it. And what might those be? Ahem,... well, as it were, we're going to learn what happened.
Like most jargon, LEARNINGS is used too often, and consequently is used where something simpler would do just as nicely, without seeming to promise undue surprises and wonders. Outside its specific context of organizational management, the word is often just a clumsy disappointment. Even inside, it frequently presumes more than it delivers.
Leverage
The head of an exceptionally successful (and incidentally "well leveraged") nonprofit organization gave this succinct definition of philanthropy's favorite buzz-word: "If I give a dollar and you give a dollar, and we get the guy next door to give a dollar, we each got 200 percent leverage. The budget may be $1 million, and we're still $999,997 away from it, but we've got excellent leverage."
More and more observers of philanthropy and fundraising treat LEVERAGE as an automatic fraud alarm, and it is hard not to agree with them. The nonprofit executive's illustration perfectly illustrates why: The word is meant to imply (indeed, in most common usage it actually means) that someone has done something timely and clever that induced others to do a great deal more toward the same goal. The image of a lever- "a rigid bar pivoted on a fixed point and used to transmit force," according to The American Heritage Dictionary-was meant to invoke the moving of great objects with diminished force. Yet often it is used to describe things done by any group of people that they would otherwise have done anyway.
In finance, LEVERAGE typically describes the amassing of huge investments or big profits without using a great deal of one's own money. In that context, most leverage is smart borrowing and good timing. Yet quite often it involves more than a little hucksterism, too, as when a borrower induces several banks to lend millions of dollars apiece to a shaky venture, urging each lender to take comfort in the presence of the others. From such leverage, great S&L debacles are born.
"This grant leverages the contributions and talents of many participating organizations in the community," said a foundation report. The clear implication: By making this grant, we induced "many organizations" to take part in something that would not otherwise have interested them. By further implication, the sum of all those efforts will be worth far more than we, the frugal foundation, are planning to pay. Now, here is the reality in that case, as in so many others: The "many organizations" were already rolling ahead on the project in question, and the foundation's contribution simply helped one left-out group to join the caravan, rather than being stranded on the roadside. That was kind of the foundation, and maybe a good thing for all involved. But was it leverage?
In financial circles, the word still means only one thing. It gets out of control-sometimes comically so-when it slips the boundaries of finance and begins to describe everything else. "The paper leveraged a lot of creative thinking in the child-welfare field." "We leveraged more media from this event than from any of our previous efforts." "The presentation got excellent leverage in terms of feedback." Oh, dear.
Linkage
Here, likewise, the sense is probably just that of "link"- that is, one thing connecting to another in some unspecified way-but the word seems wiser when it is -aged. "The organization will form linkages with community groups, child care and after-school programs," said one program description. By sounding technical, LINKAGE makes this promise seem concrete, till you think about it. What will the organization do with these other groups and programs? Conduct joint activities, share information, refer clients, or just put up their flyers on the bulletin board? No way to know. In contexts like this one, which are common, the word is little more than sound and fury, signifying...well, the point is clear.
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