I have spent most of my adult life using entrepreneurial business practices and principles to redesign and transform nonprofits. From my very first nonprofit organizational acceleration, I was hooked. The wealth one receives from helping other people is so much richer and more satisfying than money–altruism is truly life's greatest pleasure. You know the movie The Sixth Sense where the little kid sees dead people everywhere? I am the same way, except everywhere I look, I see uncaptured opportunities for social impact. I live and breathe social impact strategy, governance, financing, evaluation, and change management. Because by fixing problems in those areas, organizations are able to do more to make the world a better place.
I wrote
Scaling Altruism: A Proven Pathway for Accelerating Nonprofit Growth and Impact
Planning is easy, but execution is hard. Nonprofit leaders can gain a clear, practical understanding of how to measure and execute an organization's progress toward social impact goals with the clear, simple, and compelling four disciplines of execution.
It is simply terrific for putting strategy into practice. You will learn the key concepts from 4DX. We found reading it like getting a new set of glasses that brings the world of management into focus and allows us to see a pathway to success.
Fully revised and updated, the definitive guide for leaders on how to create lasting organisational change.
Do you remember the last major initiative you watched die in your organisation? Did it go down with a loud crash? Or was it slowly and quietly suffocated by other competing priorities? By the time it finally disappeared, it's quite likely noone even noticed.
Almost every company struggles with making change happen. The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Revised and Updated is meant to help you reach the goals you've always dreamed of with a simple, repeatable, and proven formula. In this updated edition of…
Carefully read (and read again, and then read at least a third and fourth time) both books by Jim Collins. He's rightly famous for his masterful distillation of the core qualities and strategies of the world's most successful organizations.
Once you understand key concepts like "Getting the Right People on the Bus" and what your "20-mile March" really is, and you have the grit to keep trying to apply the concepts and work through mistakes and sticking points, you will be able to lead your organization to new heights of growth and impact, when so many other organizations struggle just to keep the lights on.
Note that his “Good to Great for the Social Sector'' misapplies his concepts to the non-profit and is best ignored. The texts above apply perfectly well to the nonprofit sector, and this attempt at re-interpreting his principles fails badly.
________________________________ Can a good company become a great one? If so, how?
After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising - at times even shocking - to the modern mind.
Good to Great achieves a rare distinction: a management book full of vital ideas that reads as well as a fast-paced novel. It is widely regarded…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
Good to Great is one of the best business books written, but it doesn't tell the full story. While Collins has other books, the most important companion to my prior recommendation is Great By Choice. Really, these books should be seen as a Part 1 and a Part 2.
The elements in this book are every bit as important–specifically, the "20 Mile March" piece is one that continues to resonate with me. More battle-tested wisdom from one of the world's greatest business scholars.
THE NEW QUESTION Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.
THE NEW STUDY Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced…
Business management guru Ichak Adizes lays out a simple, memorable formula for helping you create high-performing teams.
As he deftly explains, conflict among teams comes from the failure to recognize that everyone brings different concerns and priorities to the workplace. These four "thinking styles" are embedded in our brains, and good teamwork requires 1) we learn what these styles are, 2) how to recognize coworkers' different styles, and 3) how to meet them in the middle. Critically, organizational leadership teams need all four styles.
Nothing replaces reading this fascinating and critically important guide to understanding your own strengths and executing on job #1 for management: selecting and building successful teams. So while Collins says, “Get the right people on the bus,” Asizes gives you actionable insights on how to do that.
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
While this book lacks the elegant organization of Collins or the memorable simplicity of Adizes or 4DX, it is stuffed with valuable wisdom.
It will be the longest read for your team, but it will make all of you better managers and give you specific traction points for organizational development and culture building. One of its fundamental points is particularly powerful for all of us: assume good intent.
The revolutionary book that teaches you how to use the cutting edge of human psychology to build high performing workplace cultures. Too often, great cultures feel like magic. While most leaders believe culture is critical to success, few know how to build one, or sustain it over time. What if you knew the science behind the magic-a science so predictive and powerful that you could transform your organization? What if you could use cutting edge psychology to unlock people's innate desire to innovate, experiment, and adapt? In Primed to Perform, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor show you how to do…
In this book, veteran social impact advisor and entrepreneur Donald Summers delivers a comprehensive, step-by-step blueprint to transforming small or mid-size nonprofits into an impactful and extraordinary agent of change.
The book contains templates, tools, exercises, and crystal-clear implementation guides that readers can apply immediately to begin scaling their social impact organization.
