AHP Literature Review - June 2010
This compact book seems almost simplistic as you first dip into it, but each chapter rings true as you continue reading the author’s 10 suggested steps. From Step 1 (“Inspire Goosebumps”) to Step 4 (“Pause for a Reality Check”) to Step 7 (“Ask for the Largest Gifts First”) and on, you know in your gut that you are reading a great refresher on the essential fundamentals of our trade. I enjoyed the book and think it’s excellent for front-line fundraisers and board members alike. The author provides a number of creative examples on how to involve people with high giving capacity, as well as how to inspire an organization’s rank-and-file to take ownership of the fundraising challenge.
– Ruth Benedict
In what context should one consider the publication of this new collection of articles on leadership? Perhaps it should be understood with the context of a “crisis of leadership” in corporate America and the fear that recent corporate misdeeds might spread to the nonprofit and public sectors. Or, from a quite different perspective, the book may reflect a general “hope in leadership,” a national optimism (now quickly fading) about the future of public leadership following the election of America’s President Obama. I would like to examine this new collection within a different context than these two suggested by the editor in his “Preface.” The book is usefully understood within the academicization of nonprofit management and leadership education.
We used to learn about leadership by reading the biographies of great men and women. Consider John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, which profiled eight courageous United States Senators and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Now, we read articles by professors with Ph.D.s that are excerpted in collections like this “reader.” This change is a result of the professionalization of the education of nonprofit personnel, a trend that follows the earlier proliferation of programs and degrees in public administration. Professor Roseanne M. Mirabella of Seton Hall University has been conducting a census of programs that focus on the management of nonprofit organizations. She and her colleagues have identified 292 colleges and universities in the United States with courses in nonprofit management, with a little over half of these offering graduate degree programs with concentrations in nonprofit management. Perhaps the leading academic center of philanthropy in the country is at Indiana University, where the book’s editor, James L. Perry, is a “Distinguished Professor.”
Clearly, the nonprofit sector has become an academic specialty or sub-specialty whose professors need to conduct research and publish in order to move up the academic ranks. As a former academic who attained the rank of full professor, I know this pressure well. Added to such standard publications as Harvard Business Review and Public Administration Review, we now find titles such as Nonprofit Management and Leadership, a leading journal for “nonprofit sector studies.” If authors are lucky, their articles are reprinted in collections like this one under review. Such books serve as an emblem of the professor’s value to the profession. They also serve students’ need for resources to guide their learning and material for their course work. In addition, counselors, consultants and human resource professionals offer workshops and seminars to facilitate leadership training outside of an academic setting.
This book may be seen, then, as a recent addition to the public and nonprofit leadership education industry, a library resource (at 688 pages and a paperback price of $38.00, the book is destined for the shelves of academic or public libraries) for students and professors. In fact, the publishers offer an Instructor’s Manual to the book, as well as free web content to supplement the printed articles.
So, what is worth knowing for members of the healthcare philanthropy profession? Clearly, it is not possible or even desirable to summarize the book, though it may be helpful to provide a quick overview of its contents. The collection is divided into four parts. Part One contains five articles on the nature of leadership. The five articles in Part Two review leadership theories. The largest section, Part Three, provides varied analyses of the conceptual, human relations and technical skills that define good leadership. The chapters in Part Four look at the future of leadership. All of the chapters are reprinted and adapted from either professional journals or book chapters. Half of them might be called “current,” that is first published within the last five years; the other half were published over the past two decades.
I found myself most interested in the book’s last part devoted to the future of leaders and leadership in public and nonprofit organizations. This section charts leaders’ current and future challenges. Plainly, many of these challenges are not new. As always, leaders must inspire, innovate, institutionalize. But new difficulties loom. There is the aging of current leaders and the need for educating, mentoring and transitioning to the next generation of leaders. There is the need for carefully navigating what one author called the “politics of doing good,” that is, the increasing scrutiny, by politicians and public alike, to such matters as program effectiveness, executive pay, and financial transparency. And there is the need, in an increasingly globalized world, for leaders who can forge partnerships with others – in the apposite phrase of Barbara Kellerman, there is a need for “leaders without borders.” These are important lessons gained from reading these academic articles. What is now needed is a book that conveys these truths to everyone, a book written in accessible, non-academic prose – a modern-day Profiles in Courage, if you will.