Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards

Purchased this becuase it was required reading for my degree program. I kept it because it is a good book for leaders.

I really like this book. It has answer so many questions and guided me down a successful professional path of starting and operating a nonprofit organization. I highly recommend this book to anyone out there. David Fairall, principle founder and Director of Redeeming Hope Foundation, Inc.

I found this book to be a breath of fresh air. It offers a new way of looking at nonprofit boards, in a relatively short, easy to read manner. There is a wealth of information designed to help nonprofit boards of directors become more effective. Unfortunately, existing approaches have been less than successful with most boards. This book identifies the problem as one of purpose rather than performance. The book identifies three modes that boards of directors can operate in: the traditional fiduciary mode, the strategic mode and the generative mode. The authors emphasize the importance of encouraging board members to engage in generative thinking. Engaging board members in this way makes their work more meaningful and satisfying, while at the same time benefiting the organization through more creative, committed leadership. It suggests signs to look for to identify opportunities for generative thinking. Another interesting new concept discussed in the book is considering directors as a form of "working capital". This is further broken down into intellectual capital, reputational capital, political capital and social capital. Again, this new framework for looking at what board members have to offer increases the opportunities for them to make meaningful contributions to the organization.

This book is really great for nonprofit Boards and for nonprofit leaders. It takes you through how Boards have changed and how they still need to change, but it isn't to heavy reading that you get bogged down in it. Highly recommend it!

Wonder book to study

Good

I have served on numerous non-profit boards while either being employed by a large US company or running my own small company. This book is good at pushing stale boards who know they're stale and want to change into fertile areas of meaningful activity. It even has some "how to's" at the end that the authors refer to as "parlor games", but such things work. It is a fast read, but one needs to re-read it a 2nd time to get the flow, and I'm not sure I have it down yet. My complaints are: 1) the book is overly erudite, academic, pedagogical. Too much like it was written for other scholars to critique. I wish the authors would have told stories about their own board experiences to humanize the concepts. 2)Many of the labels and much of their invented terminology, such as "cues and clues", "fuzzy front end", "sense-making", and in particular "generative leadership" are almost invented words. A little more common language and basic definitions would have helped. If you look up "generative", it is the adjective form of generate, which is defined as bring into existence, produce, engender. Somehow, those terms all come off as consultant-speak. The concepts seem right, but one almost needs to wrestle it to the ground before digesting the meaning. Heavy slogging for a lowly board member. Needs a bit more Hemingway and less Faulkner.

This is a must read for all nonorofit Board of Trustees. Governance as Leadership lays out a clear and effective way forward.

This book was on the reading list for a course I took on Governance and Leadership in grad school. As someone who works with a nonprofit board, I found the ideas interesting and plan to integrate some of them into our work. I particularly liked that it wasn't difficult to read like some other academic material.