Skip to main content

Extraordinary Board Leadership

This book builds on a lot of Carver's philosophies of board design, but is a lot more technical in nature, basically a technical retelling of Carver's stuff. Not that I wouldn't consider it useful, but it's not a page turner. It's the kind of thing you want when you're in the middle of the muck. Recap's Carver's definitions of a staff-level volunteer's "helpfulness interest" versus the board's "ownership interest". A big emphasis on planning.

Now, strategic planning, etc. seems to be going the way of all the world, or getting less popular at the very least. I was talking to some individuals from a large, impressive program at a huge trade association yesterday, and that seemed to be the feeling I got. If that is one's impression, then this book would be more of the same: hollow words with no action to back it up. But if you look at those kinds of plans as providing solid infrastructure on which to build your mission, then it'll be helpful from a technical perspective.

I say all that because one of the "exhibits" I found interesting from the book was this one:


Basically, I think this is useful because it tells the board 1) what it is accountable for and 2) what it can do to meet those responsibilities. I think a lot of problems that nonprofits experience come from the fact that people (being part of nature) abhor a power vacuum and will step in when there is unclarity or a lack of direction. Now, whether or not this is a *good* structure or provides *useful* boundaries for board members is up for discussion, but at least it's a starting place.

By Doug Eadie
ISBN # 0834217953

Popular posts from this blog

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of ...
Read more

Managing the Nonprofit Organization (Part Three)

1. What is the bottom line when there is no bottom line? Businesses as a default can rely on profit as an effectiveness measure. Nonprofits cannot use this concrete measure meaningfully. There are many different ways of looking at measurements that can serve as bottom lines of sorts, but the trick is to pick the right measurement to look at. And that can change over time, so it needs to be incorporated into the strategic planning (or whatever you want to call it) process. Nonprofits have many different customers which all need to be pleased to differing degrees. Drucker talks about the difficulty nonprofits have abandoning lost causes. Nonprofits have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes. A moral cause is an absolute good. Preachers have been thundering against fornication for five thousand years. Results, alas, have been nil, but that only proves how deeply entrenched evil is. The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased. This is the essen...
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more