Nick’s Book Blog

This book is by Robert Egger, who apparently is awesome! I thought this book was just your typical fluffy "change" book when I found it online, but it really has an edge to it, a good, useful edge. So Egger is the founder and CEO of the D.C. Central Kitchen , which, if you live around here is just one of those names you've heard of but don't know why. [BTW, their volunteer scheduling calendar is an awesome idea]. His point in writing appears to be something that I've thought about quite a bit, especially since my current organization is a culprit: the nonprofit sector is fat, happy and ineffective. Execs get too much money for not enough results, and everybody's too busy navel-gazing to actually make a difference. He's militant in a way that appeals to me, and I figured out why as I read: one of the things he's got figured out is the way that Gen-X is being wasted on the nonprofit sector. It's a thing he's noticed and doesn't approved of, s...

This is a follow up to my previous book report on Fashionable Nonsense , although The Sokal Hoax came first. It's really a compilation of writings, reviews, and the actual sources from the debate. I'm actually glad I read the more secondary materials first, since the actual reports were totally contextualized. One thing I didn't realize was that all this happened in 1996, which is getting to be a long time ago. Oh well, a little slow on the uptake. A bit of mind-bogglingness was the actual response reprinted from the follow-up issue of Social Text . It was so embarrassing you wanted to put your hand over your face. They were totally like junior-high schoolers who say after they've been dumped, "as if, I didn't like you anyway." One thing that bugged was how often Sokal talked about working in Sandinistan Nicaragua . He claims over and over that he's a "Leftist" with a capital L, mind you. It's like don't keep reminding me that you...

I got this list of Recommended Reading from the book Why Nonprofits Fail, by Stephen R. Block. They are good references so I wanted to make note of them for my future reading. Motivation and Achievement , by Raynor and Atkinson. "The Big Five Personality Dimensions and Job Performance: a Meta-Analysis." by Barrick and Mount, published in Personnel Psychology , 1991 44 1-26. Making the Right Decision , by Beach. Managing Intergroup Conflict in Industry , by Blake and Shepard. Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interes t, by Peter Block. "Escalating Commitment to a Failing Course of Action: Separating the Roles of Choice and Justification." by Bobocel and Meyer, Journal of Applied Psycholog y, 1994 79 360-364. Supervision and Performance: Managing Professional Work in Human Service Organizations, by Bunker and Wijnberg. Charismatic Leadership , by Conger and Kanungo. "Culture: A New Look Through Old Lenses." by Deal and Kennedy, Journal of Applied Beha...

This book was the most useful book I've read in a long time. It is definitely not your typical business fluff, but has some ideas that you could use as tools to really turn around a small, struggling nonprofit. I have even been plugging it to others and my boss came and saw it on my desk and we had a meaningful discussion around the points it brings up. Basically, it's a lot of organizational behavior type stuff applied to small nonprofits instead of the huge hulking corporations we usually read about. Now, I firmly believe that principles that are used to advantage in large corporations can be put to work in tiny organizations as well, however, I've found it's a) hard to convince people that the theories used by corporations b) hard to fully adapt all those theories and feel like you're still doing it right. So this book was great because no adaptation is required. A quote from the beginning of the book is "uncontolled change [the reason nonprofits fail] is a ...

I need to start reading books that teach me something new instead of firming up what I have already learned. On some level, it's good to see that you're not alone in drawing the conclusions you draw, but branching out is good too. To me, "The New Job Security," is pretty much common sense if you've ever had to worry about keeping a roof over your head in the years following 1990 or so. The gist is that the new job security involves always being desirable for a company to hire. Develop your skills, your networks, and your knowledge and you'll be fine is the premise of the book. It articulates something called "inverse security" which basically states that the more secure you *feel* in a job, the less secure you actually are. Which means that while you're sitting around being comfortable, your skills and your networks are wasting away with time. It certainly makes sense to me. The book does develop some ideas worth thinking about, and I took some n...

I know this is not a book, but then I am writing this because it is useful to me. I found this article yesterday while I was preparing for a job interview. It is by a consultant called Nancy Rathbun Scott of Liberty Communications. I think it is a great quick-and-dirty overview of the process. Explains the what, why and how. The part that was a little leaky was the how to evaluate results portion. It says: "Your evaluation might take the form of: a monthly report on work in progress; formalized department reports for presentation at staff meetings; periodic briefings of the chief staff executive and department heads; and a year end summary for the annual report." This one paragraph is a little less useful than the rest of the article. Evaulation is not about reports, I think, it's more about the stuff that's in reports. But earlier in the article she talks about goals and objectives, so I assume those are going to be the bits of information that are actually *in* the...

This book is like, wow, hard to interpret. It's kind of like getting a glimpse inside of France's psychosis of work. Corinne Maier, an economist (part time, mind you) for EDF , France's state energy company, goes out of her way to pillory the French business establishment. As a professor once told me, "this is just venality." Of course, Maier is a hilarous writer and she makes me think of a particular archetype of the hilarous Frenchwoman. Now, I'm sure there is much to pillory in these horrible corporations where people are condemned to "neoslavery". In the United States, I would say that the bloom is very much off the corporate rose as well--difference is, people's response here is much different than the one outlined in Bonjour paresse. Of course, in France, it's nearly impossible for an employer to fire an employee, so the solutions outlined by Maier make a sort of twisted sense: rot out the company from the inside, get by without expendi...

This book struck me while looking thru the books on neomanagement at the library. It was a good fluffy nonfiction read and I read it in a couple three hours. I have become interested in the topic of personal skills, or as the author ( Michael Levine, Hollywood PR Guru ) would say, "charm," since I started working with my boss who milks charm for all it's worth. Since we have similar personalities, my boss and I, I thought that it would be good to more explicitly try the approach since it seems to work so well for her. So this book does help codify some of the things that I have observed. While he offers no data or designed research to back up his points, he does have plenty of anecdotes from his years of work in the field. Basically, the approach is simple, and he admits as much: if you are consistently charming, you will have a better chance of success in your undertakings. He claims, I believe rightly, that charm is a skill that can be fairly easily learned. Further, he...

John Carver's Boards that Make a Difference can't be called anything less than a bedrock text for nonprofit governance . Everyone who's anyone in nonprofit administration should have at least pondered over the possible implementation of this model. My old organization used it and, while it had (more than) its fair share of dysfunction, its board I believe was quite effective. My current organization does not have any governance model and the board of directors is literally falling apart. So, from my perspective which is based on a miniscule data set, the approach works. My boss always talks about the need for volunteer management with a board, which I think sounds kind of condescending. I prefer to think of managing a board as project management or team leading. The Carver Model has the Executive Director as being the liaison between the day to day work of the staff and the (ideally) strategic, directional work of the board of directors. To me this makes sense, and someone...

I got this book because I started taking boxing lessons earlier this year from a guy I found on craigslist. I started taking lessons because as I get older, I feel the need to be able to defend myself physically. I started getting the literature so that I would have more background to bring to the lessons. Here is one of the more smack-talking quotes: "Boxing is at the heart of physical toughness. It's the barest art of self-defense. It can be the rawest measure of a person. It's the most basic of competitions where fears are met and overcome or all is lost. It's the ideal vehicle for unfettered agression. Short of actual hand-to-hand combat, it's the ultimate contest between two people." The rest of the book gets into more actual how-tos as opposed to this motivational stuff, which presumably the reader is into since he bought the book. Anyway, I thought the book was a really good introduction, and the guy who co-wrote it was a true beginner, so he brings tha...

I know, this is technically not a book but I may need to refer to this in the future. This is a video made in 1987 which is a good treatment of how to garden. Now, I am a complete neophyte to the gardening scene, however this video gives you a good vision of how wonky you can be about vegetables. Jeff Ball is the host and is likeable and not embarrassing to watch, if a little stiff. His big deal is " intensive gardening ". Since this video is on cool weather vegetables he gets to show off his tunnel set up for lengthening the growing season. Since I live in the Mid-Atlantic, I don't think it's worth that amount of work to add some more months, but if you live in Minnesota, you might take the trouble. One good point he makes is that if you garden on a more year-round basis, you can get by with storing less food. Good info on soil conditioning, disease, etc., which are the harder parts if you want to garden properly.

This book rocks! It says everything that has been repressed deep inside me for years. Alan Sokal, the author of the book, is the NYU Physics professor who perpetrated a hoax on the literary establishment by getting Social Text to publish his parodic paper . He is my hero du jour, and a very smart and reasonable one. Fashionable Nonsense is hilarious. I mean, I'm sure that it is hilarious only to a relatively small sub-sub-category of people who have read or studied "post-modern" or "foundational" theory and found it to be largely of ill report. I would read bits of the book to my spousal unit and we would laugh and laugh--funnier than Ashlee Simpson's hoe-down on Saturday Night Live. Sokal's main targets in this book are Lacan , Kristeva , Irigaray , Latour , Baudrillard , Deleuze and Guattari , and Virilio . I am more familiar with some of these theorists than others, but Sokal's criticism hits home, and he's smart enough to render a proper c...

I got this book at the airport in Cincinnati on my way back to BWI. I got it because I have been thinking that people skills are where the cash is at in this day and age. Anyhow, the book was a fairly interesting nonfiction read for the airplane. However, I found I had already intuited most of the strategies they gave. Basically, if you boiled down the advice it would be "look around carefully and make judgments based on what you see." Of course, the authors were careful to point out that certain things were not good indicators of personality, and that exceptions to these rules are often called for. Most high-functioning people are pretty good at doing this kind of thing as a matter of course. Here's an interesting quote that I liked, though: "Truly kind, thoughtful, and confident people do not treat others in dramatically different ways depending on their mood or their perception of what someone can do for them. As a result, watching how someone acts toward 'eve...

I got this book at a place called Powell's Bookstore which has locations in the airport in Portland, Oregon. It was awesome because they had all these used books in the airport--perfect because it's not like you really want to spend 25 bucks for a book that you just want to read on the airplane. Anyhow, I have heard of this book forever, and I finally decided this was a good opportunity to read it. I infer that it's the seminal work on interpersonal relationships, and a lot of what it has to say, I've learned from people who obviously were informed by the book. It is copyright 1936, so obviously it's stood the test of time. (My boss says that when you plan a conference, you should have food that stands the test of time. We used shrimp and quesadillas and apparently they work okay for that purpose.) My takeaway from the book is that you need to let people "save face". For example, you shouldn't corner people and say "you should do whatever" b...

I got this book because I am ever thinking about starting a business or two. Who knows when that will actually happen. But I have started reading the literature. This book is a workbook. This particular edition is copyright 2003, which makes it pretty recent. The cover says it features actual business plans of Pizza Hut , Ben & Jerry's and others. First off the whole Ben & Jerry's thing didn't do anything for me because I don't like to support neo-communism. My second thought is that Pizza Hut et al are really big and make starting one's own business (presumably a small business) seem pretty inaccessible. But that was a first impression, and the book's exercises are largely pretty useful. The book takes you through picking out which kind of business plan matches your business (kind of like whether a person should use a functional or a chronological resume ). Then it talks about asking the key questions, knowing your market, knowing whether there is a mar...

The dummies series is exactly the kind of book that is nice to get at the library. I mean, I have found them to be terrific resources, but it's not the kind of thing you want a lot of on your shelf at home or at work. Plus, you either mastered the content and thus don't need the book anymore--or--you (sniff, sniff) failed in your pursuit. Either way, you don' t need the very branded look all over your shelving unit cluttering up your French poetry and coffee table books on Andalusian art. Gosh! This book is pretty useful tho - obviously very similar in philosophy to the book by Mr. Ziglar--only more diagrammy and flow-charty. By Tom Hopkins ISBN# 0764553631

This is a Jossey-Bass book and it's getting a wee bit long in the tooth. It is copyright 1992 but feels much older than that. It is quite theoretical and academic, not that there's anything wrong with that. NB: I got a little tired of it and just skimmed thru so take my opinion with a grain of salt. To cut to the chase, the "theory of the commons" is based on nine assumptions, so let the debate begin. 1. Social Action: that a characteristic of a nonprofit and/or voluntary service is its intangibility. I think this is not really true. I think a lot of junior league types spend a lot of time on "intangibles," but a lot of people I know in the nonprofit sector are awful worried about outcomes. My perspective is that it's a crappy nonprofit that assuages its conscience with complaints of its work being "intangible." Every nonprofit should come up with some kind of indicator or deliverable to justify its existence. Otherwise, leave the money for so...

Did you ever wonder who Zig Ziglar was? I had heard that name a lot and then I figured out he was a salesman. It's one of those names that just goes into the common cultural repository without anyone quite knowing why. I got this book because, wanting to go into business for myself, I figure I need to know how to sell a thing or two. Basically, all the literature is telling me that people who you think of as jerky salesmen (you know the gold-toothed used car types or the people who call your office and go "you mean you don't want to save money???") are not right at all. Selling is about having a relationship with people and finding the people who need what you want to sell. So that part is easy. The part that makes me nervous though is the prospecting part. This book addresses that some, here are the tips: 1. Take personal responsibility for building self-confidence and self-esteem. 2. Selling is a transference of feeling. 3. You can have everything in life you want i...

Okay so this is like the second time I checked this out from the library. It's my on-again off-again thing with Illustrator. You see, I have these graphic visions parading around in my head but I am unable to bend the pixels to my will. Since I am too cheap to buy the book that actually corresponds to the version of Illustrator that I have, the pixels' lack of malleability is really somewhat understandable (how lame). Anyway, half the lessons on the CD won't download and I have to do some font manager thing which looks hard. So I'm going to take this one back yet again. I think I'm too undisciplined to learn Illustrator from a book. I did find a free class to go see, so maybe that will help. N By the Adobe Illustrator Team ISBN#0201710153

I read this book last year and it was a really good guide to the political system. It does not get too far down into the weeds but is still very valuable and would be a really good read for any lobbyist who has to deal with volunteers. It would also be a valuable addition to any association training curriculum or board orientation process. By Donald E. Dekieffer ISBN # 1556521944

This blog is for me to take notes of the books I'm reading, so that I won't have to buy a bunch of books and then keep them around. I have too many books already, and some of them will have to be pruned out. I used to believe you could never have too many books, but now I read so much self-help, popular nonfiction, and books of passing importance to a) purchase them and b) archive them. So I'm going to keep my records here and then I'll be able to refer back to them if I'm ever looking for similar information in the future. I'm going to have a gap in my notes between the time I quit buying books and now, but I have a few records and will put as much historical info in as I can. But mostly it'll be forward-looking.