editorials

The abrupt resignation of a CEO isn't always a sign of trouble. At the Bush Foundation last week, Peter Hutchinson's unexpected departure signified something positive.

By all accounts, Hutchinson is leaving the foundation's presidency of his own volition, asserting as he goes that the transformation he was hired to achieve has been wrought.

His claim is justified.

The Bush Foundation is a sharper and potentially more effective tool for solving a smaller number of specific problems than it was in 2007, when Hutchinson took the helm.

Both he and a remarkable board of directors deserve credit for asking tough questions about philanthropic effectiveness, then going where their answers led them.

Hutchinson, 62, who is best-known to most Minnesotans as the Independence Party's 2006 candidate for governor, possesses a keen, impatient mind.

He's made a career fostering changes in the strategies and operations of complex organizations, and he has headed several of them, including the state Finance Department, the Minneapolis public schools and the Dayton Hudson Foundation.

His seemingly out-of-the-blue decision to leave the helm of the state's fourth-largest foundation is in keeping with his modus operandi: Do what you set out to do, then leave quickly when you're done.

Hutchinson didn't sprint to the exit because he has a better offer or another yen to run for elective office -- far from it, he says. Rather, he's looking for a new challenge, preferably in the public-service realm.

His record at Bush should help him land a good one. In 2007, he came to a rather typical do-gooder foundation that spread its annual grants far and wide throughout a three-state region.

It could do so, Hutchinson notes, because Archie and Edyth Bush provided almost no restrictions on how the proceeds of their founding gift ought to be spent.

Not even the foundation's location was set; in the 1970s, the board, led by the late former Gov. Elmer L. Andersen, had to go to court to keep the foundation based in Minnesota.

Many small grants with too few results left the circa 2006 Bush board unsatisfied. In Hutchinson's words: "They decided they ought to do something hard. Lots of organizations don't have the independence and freedom that we have. They can't do hard things. We could."

The Bush Foundation discontinued its scattershot approach to grantmaking in 2008. Instead, it has chosen to concentrate its resources with long-term commitments in three areas:

• Supporting the self-determination of 23 Indian tribes in this region by providing the training and resources necessary for Indian people to craft their own national constitutions and develop stronger indigenous leadership. The constitutions foisted by the U.S. government on Indians many decades ago have proven unworkable and are the sources of numerous problems.

• Improving educational attainment by improving teacher education. Bush has forged partnerships with eight public universities and six Twin Cities-based private colleges to raise admissions standards and improve the content and structure of teacher-education programs.

• Refocusing longstanding Bush leadership training efforts on community-based problem-solving. This change has included more Bush sponsorship of events, forums and citizens commissions aimed at helping communities design effective responses to economic and demographic shifts and at helping local leaders acquire skills for handling the next challenge that comes along.

Some of that work is barely begun. The Bush board is committed to its continuation, said chairwoman Jan Malcolm, the former state health commissioner and Courage Center CEO who is holding the executive reins at Bush for now.

Despite the change at the Bush helm, "there will be no intended pause in what we've committed to do," Malcolm said this week.

That's good -- for while that work has just begun, it's highly promising.

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