Forces for Good



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Hardcover
313 pages
ISBN 9780787986124 Published Oct. 2007
Jossey-Bass
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Forces for Good
The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits
By Leslie Crutchfield, Heather McLeod Grant, Steve Case 

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Friday Links
Posted May 13, 2011 7:28 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ Peter Buffet—musician, son of Warren and author of Life Is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment*—will not be attempting to succeed his father as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The reason why can probably be deduced from the title of his book, but he went into more detail, talking about Growing Up Buffett in today's Freakonomics podcast with Stephen Dubner. Discussing his degree of interest in the company growing up, he says:

Well, you know, growing up we really didn’t know what my dad did. It was quite mysterious. He read a lot, which he still does. And I will say if you walk in the house today you will see the same thing that I saw in 1965. He’s just this consistent human being in spades. It was incredible. But we didn’t know what he did. In fact, when my sister filled out a form, I think in fourth or fifth grade, about what our parents did, she put “security analysis,” and it was assumed that what he did was check alarm systems.

He also explains why he is living proof that investing in yourself and growing your own life is much more important and satisfying than having a pile of money that belongs to someone else's success. And, though he didn't follow in his father's career path, Peter Buffett is a philanthropist like his father, which brings us to our next link.

*If you're interested in learning more about the book, Jon wrote a short review and discussed what it was like having Peter as a client when he worked for a digital media company on this blog last April.

➻ The Economist reviewed three books this week about Giving For Results. One of them is Do More Than Give, which is the follow up to a book we greatly admired when it was released in 2007—Forces For Good. The review begins by taking a look at the state of philanthropy in America.

Whether America’s famed philanthropic tradition is all it is cracked up to be will become much clearer during the next few years. Superficially, that tradition has emerged from the global financial crisis in remarkably good shape. In the past year some 69 of America’s billionaires and billionaire families have promised to give away at least half of their fortunes by signing the Giving Pledge championed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the world’s richest men. Among them is 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, proof that America’s giving gene has passed to the next generation.

The question is, will all that giving, by the billionaires and the thousands more Americans with far smaller amounts of money, actually do any good? There is rather a depressing history of well-intentioned donations often doing nothing to alleviate society’s problems, and sometimes even making matters worse. As Mr. Buffett has said many times, “making money is far easier than giving it away effectively.”

Looking at how Do More Than Give addresses this issue, the review states:

Of the six practices of effective philanthropists described in ">Do More Than Give, two stand out as being unusual. To achieve real change—what the authors, Leslie Crutchfield, John Kania and Mark Kramer, call “catalytic philanthropy”—the best course may be to engage in political advocacy to change government policy, they argue. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing this a lot more than most, on issues ranging from education reform to international aid. But the advice also works at a local level, as the book illustrates through the story of how the Tow Foundation improved juvenile justice policy in Connecticut. Their second sound piece of advice is that philanthropists should work together more often. This seems obvious, but as the authors rightly ask, “Why don’t more foundations actively collaborate with their peers?”

We brought Leslie Crutchfield to Milwaukee a few years ago to speak to local non-profits. You can find video of that event on our YouTube page, or read the Jack Covert Selects review of her first book if you're interested in learning more.

➻ Named after Edison's idea that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, the third annual 99% Conference was held last week in New York. Their list of speakers was really impressive this year, so I've been keeping my eye out for video and roundups. And while I can't find a whole lot, there are a few things trickling out such as Cool Hunting's recaps of Day One and Day Two and Nora Herting's Illustrated Takeaways of a few of the presentations. I'll share more as I find it, but the links on the speaker pages themselves have some interesting material to dig through in the meantime, including an interview with Chris Guillebeau about how Balanced People Don’t Change the World.

➻ You might call Andrew Kessler's Novel Approach to Bookselling a bit unbalanced. He opened a bookstore in Manhattan whose shelves contain about 3,000 books, but they're all copies of the same book—his own history of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission. Inc.'s Eric Markowitz tells us more:

The store opened on April 12, its shelves loaded with about 3,000 copies of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission. There is no café, there are no readings. The chalkboard outside reads: "We have one book, but we are not Scientologists." A passerby wondered aloud on a recent Saturday morning, "What the hell is this place?" [...] At around 3 p.m., a young women wanders into the store.

"Can I help you find anything?" Kessler asks.

"I'm looking for a book," she says.

"Is it this one?" Kessler responds.

I have no idea why we didn't do this with The Hundred Best Business Books of All Time.

➻ If you liked Nora Herting's Illustrated Takeaways from the 99% Conference above, you'll love Mike Rohde's Chick-fil-A Leadercast Sketchnotes. And if you love Mike Rohde's Chick-fil-A Leadercast Sketchnotes, you'll absolutely fall apart when you see Wendy MacNaughton's Meanwhile, The San Francisco Public Library at The Rumpus.

➻ So, NASA Announced the Results of Epic Space-Time Experiment last week. And, well...

"The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts," says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

I think this should have been the soundtrack of that epic announcement:

Barn Owl & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Live At The Cube (Bristol) from Dan Crossley on Vimeo.



Tweet-a-tweet-Tweet Recap
Posted May 2009 9:05 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Publishing Industry - 800 CEO Read Blog

We posted quite a bit over on twitter this week. We tried pulling together what we saw people saying about business books, recommendations for business books and some ideas around the future of publishing at large. Here is the what we found:

# Authors 4 #followfriday @gladwell @stevenbJohnson @danielpink @alanmwebber @jack_welch @suzywelch @johncmaxwell @tonyrobbins @Rich_Dad about 4 hours ago from web

# RT @TalentAcquisit The Art of War by Sun Tzu is 1 of the best business strategy books. For business strategy check out http://www.sonshi.com 9:18 PM Apr 29th from web

# RT @charlesseybold Books: finished Predictably Irrational (****), starting Art of Profitability (v good so far), biz novel like The Goal 1:52 PM Apr 29th from web

# @kennypratt yes, here is the mystery box url: http://800ceoread.com/mysterybox 10:04 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @tomewing:The Cluetrain Manifesto is the Velvet Underground of biz books: everyone who read it formed a dodgy start-up. (via @ricklevine) 3:57 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @mdrips Escape from Cubicle Nation is ok; Think Big Manifesto totally sucks; Me 2.0 is mediocre. Few biz books are worthwhile. 3:56 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @robbiebax @BtoBGuru great non-social media biz books 2008 "forces for Good" "back of the napkin" "predictably irrational"--loved em all! 3:02 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @whgtoga Cool book ! One of the top 100 biz books of all time. (CEO READ) The Story Factor- Annette Simmons. 2:57 PM Apr 28th from web

# Great to see @jack_welch joining Twitternation today.2:38 PM Apr 28th from web

# oops RT @sarahcannon Finished reading Tribes over wkend, halfway thru The Tipping Point this wk. Both read too easily to be biz books...2:35 PM Apr 28th from web

# @sarahcannon Finished reading Tribes over wkend, halfway thru The Tipping Point this wk. Both read too easily to be biz books...2:35 PM Apr 28th from web

# Looking for what business books to read? Check out our 377 reviews - http://800ceoread.com/blog/... 3:52 PM Apr 27th from web

# RT @Techmeme Amazon Acquires Stanza, an E-book Application for the iPhone (Brad Stone/Bits) http://bit.ly/JkHFz (via @debbiestier)3:42 PM Apr 27th from web

# RT @sharif28 Just kick-started my daily reading regimen by ordering 3 new books: Tribes, Business Stripped Bare and the Think Big Manifesto.3:33 PM Apr 27th from web

# RT @LauraJDaley My two favorite biz books are Primal Leadership & A Whole New Mind. 12:00 PM Apr 26th from web

# You can follow Nancy at @nancyduarte.12:00 PM Apr 26th from web

# Nancy Duarte on passion and purpose - http://bit.ly/JFNAX The Element, Outliers, and Talent Is Overrated all intersect here. 11:58 AM Apr 26th from web

# RT @chinasolved Pirated biz-books now @ my sbwy sta. Saw 'Black Swan' 'Essential Drucker" & 'Outliers' for 10 rbm each. 10:51 AM Apr 26th from web

# RT @fredwilson: Kenny Lerer is co-founder of HuffPo & here's his thoughts on newspapers http://bit.ly/v8Z0y

You can follow us at @800ceoread or jump over to our twitter page.



Canada Tops the List this Month!
Posted April 3, 2008 5:12 a.m. by delicious
In International Bestsellers - 800 CEO Read Blog

Here's what 800-CEO-READ shipped to other countries in March. Here's what they're reading overseas. :

The Big Switch - Quebec, Canada

Purpose - Besiktas, Istanbul

The Quest for Global Dominance: 2nd Edition - Shanghai, China

Get Out of Your Own Way - Frankfort, Germany

Who's Your City? - Hamburg, Germany

Strengths Finder 2.0 - Strattford-Upon-Avon, Great Britian

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators - Florence, Italy

Senior Leadership Teams - Lisboa, Portugal

Forces for Good - Toronto, Canada

Hug Your People - London, Great Britain

This past month, we've seen more books then ever going to many different places, unlike previous times when just one book may have been ordered for businesses in different countries. American business books are getting more popular in other parts of the world. If you haven't ordered these titles yet, you may want to - just to see what could be interesting to companies in these other countries....



Love the lists
Posted Dec. 19, 2007 1:36 a.m. by kate
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog

Gotta love this time of year. Lots of lists. As is true in business book publishing. Let me catch you up on the last few weeks of lists. This week we announced the semifinalists for our first ever 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards. There are the best books according to the Amazon editors. And BusinessWeek's choice picks. Books written by Economist writers.

And, now we have the best books as chosen by the Economist. You'll find a number of duplicate titles on the various lists. The business titles from the Economist lists are:

Find the entire list here.

*Starred books are in the running for our 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards which will be announced on January 15th.



Jack Covert Selects - Forces for Good
Posted Oct. 23, 2007 2:40 a.m. by 800-ceo-read

"Forces For Good: The Six Practices of High Impact Non-Profits" by Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant, Jossey-Bass, 336 pages, $29.95, Hardcover, October 2007, ISBN 9780787986124

What industry generates more than $1 trillion in revenues, is adding more jobs than any other sector, and is ranked #3 after retail and wholesale trade? Non-profits. The social sector is gaining momentum in its ability to serve communities and influence policy, and the time has come for business leaders to pay attention. Non-profits have been looking to business for better operating practices for some time, and now companies should be looking to their counterparts for equally new insights.

In Forces For Good, authors Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant report on their three-year study to find successful non-profits and pinpoint the practices that made them stand out from the 1.5 million other U.S.-based non-profits. The authors ignored traditional measures of success like overhead ratio or annual fundraising and instead looked for non-profits that "are driven to achieve broad social change... [and] have an unstoppable desire to create deep impact as well." Six practices emerged from the twelve case study organizations: advocate and serve, make markets work, inspire evangelists, nurture non-profit networks, master the art of adaptation, and share leadership.

In the world of non-profits, organizations tend to either provide services to a community (e.g., Red Cross) or propose policies to influence public debate (e.g., Brookings Institution, a D.C.-based public policy organization), matching a traditional view from business--offering either products or services. Providing both categories better serves customers and generates greater profits, but North-Carolina-based Self-Help has had greater impact learning from the constituents they serve and advocating legislation to further their cause. This non-profit started by providing mortgages to low-income families, and found through working with clients that over 10,000 families were losing their homes due to predatory lending practices. After successfully lobbying the state legislature, Self-Help established the Center for Responsible Lending, which conducts policy research and advocates for changes to state and federal lending laws. This effort has led to 22 states enacting anti-predatory lending laws.

Businesses can learn from both watching the social sector and working with it. The "advocate and serve" practice draws striking similarity to the philosophy John Bogle used in founding Vanguard with the lowest-cost indexed mutual funds in the industry, and then advocating that passionately customers purchase the product for their financial well-being. Danny Meyer's Union Square Ventures connected Share Our Strength with American Express as he looked to expand a "charge against hunger" campaign nationally. Forces for Good has the good ideas and inspirational lessons only non-profits can provide--and which the private sector can't afford to miss out on.




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