Praise for Nonprofit Boards That Work

"This book offers a refreshing and candid look at the challenges of nonprofit boards. It moves away from theoretical frameworks to take you inside the real world of nonprofit organizations. . . . A must for any executive director who needs reassurance that building effective boards is tough work, but well worth the effort."–Sherry Rockey, Executive Director, International Women’s Media Foundation

"Maureen Robinson is uniquely qualified to help us understand the issues related to boards that are effective, those that are not, and why. It is certain that board members, potential board members, and executive directors who read this book will better understand their roles and responsibilities, and will be better able to avoid common pitfalls. As a result, the impact of their efforts on those whom their organizations exist to serve will be enhanced."–Ron Burkard, Executive Director, World Neighbors

As more than 10 million people in the United States alone say yes to board service, they also expect to see their time and talents used effectively. This invaluable book presents a straightforward approach to understanding the role of the board, tailoring its work to meet the needs of specific organizations, and creating a culture of board productivity that makes participation rewarding for board members as well as the organizations they serve. Nonprofit Boards That Work:

• Distinguishes between theory and practice and encourages boards to explore how they genuinely add value to the work of the organization
• Goes beyond the hows and whys of nonprofit governance to provide frank advice and real-world examples of what works, what doesn’t, what requires a miracle, and what can be achieved through diligent and deliberate effort
• Offers practical yet flexible strategies that can be tried by any nonprofit board, whatever its current effectiveness

. . . and much more to guide nonprofit organizations and their boards toward accomplishing the goals they seek.

Although one often thinks of collaborative management and related group problem-solving as different interests coming together in "peaceful harmony," nothing could be further from reality. Collaboration in real-world action requires steering and negotiation in virtually every situation, with a considerable process that precedes agreement. This progression is, in effect, a "mini" political and managerial process we have come to know as collaborative politics and its management. This volume explores the process and operations of collaboration and collaborative politics, from routine transactions, or "small p" politics, to the significant issue forces or "big P" politics. Collaboration is defined here as the process of facilitating and operating in multiorganizational arrangements for addressing problems and producing solutions through the contributions of several organizations and individuals. Throughout the book, readers are gradually exposed to analysis of key findings in collaborative politics from the long research tradition in policy and political science. This book adapts a series of stories to highlight some of collaborative politics' dynamics, from a range of jurisdictions. It further analyzes the efficacy of storytelling as a learning tool and contributor to practice in different contexts. With collaborative politics often associated with negotiations among administrative actors, authors Robert Agranoff and Aleksey Kolpakov demonstrate how interorganization/interagency collaboration operates and is managed, as well as how it has been modified or adjusted in its fundamental core concepts of bureaucratic organization and hierarchy. The Politics of Collaborative Public Management is designed as a core text for undergraduate and graduate classes on collaborative management and governance.

This professional book examines the concept of engaged leadership. Specifically, it focuses on the need for leaders in personal and professional realms, for-profit and non-profit, to understand the importance of engagement in order to achieve enhanced satisfaction and motivation among stakeholders (including employees, shareholders, investors, supporters, customers, suppliers, the community, competitors, family, and partners), and hence, an augmented level of designed thinking, which leads to increased innovation and on-going leadership development. Divided into three sections-engaged leadership development at the personal level, implementation at the organizational level, and manifestation in practice-this book provides professionals, practitioners and policy makers as well as students with the tools and skills to lead actively and conscientiously and help them understand the importance of creativity and compassion for development. Engaged leadership operates on the fundamental principle that leaders have to first and foremost perceive themselves as leaders, and then engage in design thinking, as they will need to develop strategies to reach, encourage, and positively appeal to these stakeholder groups. Leadership is neither limited to those holding formal managerial position, nor to any particular setting. Leaders can be found everywhere, in all layers of society. Leadership is only possible, however, if one dares to perceive and define oneself as a leader. And only when leadership is adopted as a reality within one's personal perception, can engaged leadership be applied. Featuring contributions from academics, scholars, and professionals from around the world, each providing cases, interactive questions and reflective notes, this book will be of interest to professionals, practitioners, policy makers, students and scholars interested in creative leadership, management, organizational behavior, and governance.

A volume in Research in Public Management Series Editors: Lawrence R. Jones and Nancy C. Roberts, Naval Postgraduate School Volunteer management has many challenges, not the least of which is how we study it and view it. Academics examine it from a variety of disciplines and practitioners experience it in a variety of contexts. However both approaches have limitations. In academia we go to public administration schools to learn about public and nonprofit management, to business schools to apply the principles of private enterprise to nonprofit management, to sociology departments to study the phenomena of volunteerism, to psychology departments to understand the motives of volunteers, and economics departments to examine the value or economic worth of volunteerism. The liability of the academic approach is the segmentation of study and research into departmental areas. The study of volunteers and volunteerism needs to cross all of these organizational and discipline boundaries to be fully appreciated and understood as a field of interest. In contrast, practitioners view volunteer management from their own unique experiences.They try to gauge success in volunteer management based on what they have encountered in particular organizations, towns, cultures, and countries in which they work. As important as these insights are, they are difficult to generalize beyond local settings. Just because an individual has been successful in working with volunteers, it does not mean that the lessons learned in one situation can be translated to others under all conditions. The target audience for this volume is anyone who manages volunteers. The goal of the volume is to demonstrate the breadth of thought on volunteer management, both across disciplines and a wide range of settings in which volunteers work.

Although every country is distinguished by its history, culture and language as well as its unique economic, environmental and social conditions, it can be expected that international operating companies will exhibit common patterns since sustainability challenges do not stop at national borders.

Building on original data based on results of the International Corporate Sustainability Barometer survey, this book depicts and analyzes the current state of corporate sustainability management and corporate social responsibility.

Part I describe the approach and summarizes the broad results, outlining the methodology and offering an overview of results of the ICSB survey. Part II presents specific findings for each of eleven countries surveyed: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA. Part III provides a comparative analysis and highlights broad patterns in the international results. Most strikingly, the book reveals surprisingly widespread similarities among the sustainability management practices of large companies in economically developed countries all over the world.

All the survey results are analyzed according to the same Triple-I approach: Intention - Why do companies manage sustainability?;Integration - To what extent do companies embed sustainability in their core business and in their organization? And Implementation - How is corporate sustainability operationalized? Based on this structure the analysis serves not only to make comparisons and to investigate national characteristics; it also builds a foundation for examining whether there truly is a world-spanning common state of the art of corporate sustainability. Distinguished authors who were involved in the International Corporate Sustainability Barometer project offer their insights, identifying and discussing national and international patterns that can provide the basis for further ideas and inspiration to practitioners and researchers worldwide who are engaged in corporate sustainability."

Recent decades have seen substantial growth in the range of assistance programmes for SMEs and entrepreneurs across the world. Once regarded as peripheral to the economy and public policy, the role of small firms and of entrepreneurship is now recognized as of key importance in the economic growth and development strategies of many nations. The range of interventions and support focused on promoting SMEs and entrepreneurship is substantial and expanding, so Government, SMEs and Entrepreneurship Development asks 'what are some of the main policy instruments being used, and how effective are they?' It considers policies in different countries, examines key interventions and tools used to promote entrepreneurship and SME development and concludes with contributions on how to best evaluate their effectiveness. The contributor chapters by academics and practitioners from businesses, enterprise development agencies and governments, are empirical or evidence-based and use both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Drawing on experience from a wide range of both developed and emerging countries and economies, the contributions focus on the broad strategies that different governments and communities have adopted to foster entrepreneurship and SMEs; the policy tools and instruments that can be used to promote small business and entrepreneurship; and on the outcomes of policy instruments and the methods used to evaluate interventions. Their findings will help researchers, policy-makers, economic development officers, civil servants, elected officials, and business associations to better understand the issues in this important field.

This book is based on an important but complicated question: How have nonprofit human service organizations sustained themselves over time? It documents the organizational histories of pioneering nonprofits that have unique missions and significant longevity - in one case, 157 years. This volume provides one of the few documented histories of nonprofit human service organizations and includes a cross-case analysis of the major themes that help to expand our understanding of organizational lifecycles with respect to organizational growth and resilience. The major themes appear in the form of clusters of organizations that are exemplars of: leadership (experiences of either founding or long-term executive directors); internal operations (capacity to respond to changing community needs); and external relations (capacity to develop unique and/or sustained relationships with funding sources and/or donor populations). These cases also provide students of nonprofit management with opportunities for case-based learning that complements the more time-limited and episodic teaching cases which rarely provide learners with a longitudinal perspective of nonprofit organizations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work.

This proceedings volume brings together the results of a corporate discussion on research, academic teaching and education in the field of business and economics in the context of globalization. The contributions examine leadership and sustainability, quality and governance and the internationalization of higher education. With a particular focus on business education and business schools, the book discusses the labor market and modernization as well as contemporary trends and challenges. By including both academic papers and contributions from industry, it forges research links between academia, business and industry.

This new handbook builds on The Handbook of Community Movements and Local Organizations published in 2007, and is the only resource defining the field of study related to small nonprofit organizations and to studying communities from the standpoint of associations that make up communities. It explores the history and conceptualizations of community, theoretical concepts in community organizations, social movements ranging from health to crime, and community practice methods. Further it provides authoritative statements of major theory areas, gives examples of different sub areas of the field, provides guidance to people working as practitioners in the field, and nicely coincides with the increasing interest in clinical sociology. This handbook is of great interest to academics, students and practitioners with an interdisciplinary resource to understand and collaborate in work with contemporary communities.

"This book provides an excellent guide to the current literature on co-production, with especially valuable attention to its management and evaluation. By highlighting the lessons from co-production in the private sector, the authors give very useful and timely new insights into how co-production can contribute to public services and help to improve public value."- Tony Bovaird, Professor of Public Management and Policy (Emeritus), University of Birmingham, UK Coproduction covers the practice in which state actors (for example, government agents) and lay actors (for example, members of the public) work together in any phase of the public service cycle. In the past two decades, the literature of coproduction has grown swiftly, but in a fragmented manner. Thus, this book systematizes the literature on coproduction into a comprehensive framework that tackles activation, management and evaluation, illustrated through empirical examples. It adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, analyzing literature streams such as public administration and policy, public management, business management, and marketing, among others. It will be invaluable reading for academics working on coproduction, public management, and business management.

The importance of technology transfer for the competitive advantage of companies and the economic success of nations cannot be overstated. Technology is a determining element for firms and nations to increase productivity, to compete, and to prosper. In The Competitive Advantage of Regions and Nations, the authors stress that companies, investment promotion agencies, and government bodies cannot simply sit and wait until new technologies arrive in their domain. Rather, they need to manage the identification, assessment, attraction, absorption and application of new technologies. In this comprehensive book, Boris Ricken and George Malcotsis explain how technology transfer in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) projects can be systematically managed. Using some 40 case studies as illustration, they give step-by-step guidance for managers. The explanation of theory in this book, together with the frameworks and cases delivering solutions to the various challenges of technology transfer will be highly appreciated by managers of companies, investment promotion agencies, and government bodies alike. It also offers students confronted with the topic an understandable study guide.

Benefits theory connects an organization's mission, the public and private benefits it produces, and the societal groups that it benefits, to an appropriate income mix. This book applies benefits theory to the financing of nonprofit and other social purpose organizations to guide managers and leaders towards finding the best mix of income sources for their organizations, to help educate future managers about resource development and to stimulate additional research on the financing of nonprofits and other forms of social enterprise. Individual chapters are devoted to organizations primarily reliant on earned income, gifts, government support and investment income, respectively, as well as to organizations that are well diversified in their sources of operating support. Each type of income, as well as mixed income portfolios are analyzed in depth. Detailed case studies of contemporary social purpose organizations are discussed throughout the book, and templates are provided to help leaders apply benefits theory to analyze the income opportunities and portfolios of their own organizations. Comprehensive and practitioner-friendly, this book is suitable not only for teaching graduate and undergraduate students in non-profit management, social enterprise, public administration and business management, but also for informing practicing managers, teachers and researchers, and funders of social purpose organizations.

Nonprofit organizations form a substantial part of the economy in all countries. Management of nonprofit organizations is characterized by a number of distinctive aspects in relation to human resources, communications, and strategic planning and the inappropriateness of using profitability as the indicator of success. In recent years there has been emphasis upon developing a consistent mission and set of values. This book focuses upon the challenges facing nonprofit organizations, particularly with regard to collaboration, trust and innovation.

Tired of dry, theory-only reading you can't connect to Real Life? If so, you've picked up the right book Dr. Roz's years of research and experience have equipped her to share with you a "blueprint" that will guide you in leading the process of constructing or redeveloping, a Culture of Excellence within your organization. Information and experiences shared, while based at a non-profit organization, are relevant for any industry. This book is written in an exciting, engaging manner, using acronyms, alliterations, metaphors, real life and workplace examples as well as hands-on activities that will catch your attention, stick in your mind, and ensure that you capture pertinent, usable information. Dr. Roz shares some power tools needed for positive organizational transformation, including Collaborative Leadership, Learning Organization Theory and -- her personal favorite -- Appreciative Inquiry. These change-management tools have been studied and written about, but not so much in the nonprofit/social context where they can have life-changing impact on organizations and on the people they serve and empower. Through defining these tools and demonstrating their impact, this book will prepare you and your organization to attain, maintain and sustain "A Culture of Excellence." So, open this book and open yourself to an excellent journey ahead. Now let's build