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

We've Always Done it That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change

From what I can tell, the impetus for this book was that the folks who wrote it, Jeff De Cagna , David Gammel , Jamie Notter , Mickie Rops and Amy Smith , were “concerned by the instinctively conservative approach to organizational stewardship that far too many association executives and volunteers continue to pursue in the early years of the 21 st century.” I took notes throughout the book, and now I realize they are far too extensive to make a very good book review. And I am definitely the choir that this book is preaching to. However, I really, really liked the problems these folks addressed and they pretty much slaughtered and butchered several sacred cows. This book is not extensive narrative or heavily footnoted, but it is based on the collective experience of 5 people who together have worked with many different organizations, and the collective themes will be familiar to anyone in the field. On a meta level, this book takes observations of what’s happening in the
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

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