The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential,…
60 Small Ways to Improve Your Life in the Next 100 Days By Marelisa Fabrega
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to make drastic changes in order to notice an improvement in the quality of your life. At the same time, you don’t need to wait a long time in order to see the measurable results that come from taking positive action. All you have to do is take small steps, and take them consistently, for a period of 100 days…
Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success by Ken Segall
Simplicity isn’t just a design principle at Apple—it’s a value that permeates every level of the organization. It’s what helped Apple recover from near death in 1997 to become the most valuable company on earth in 2012.
As ad agency creative director, Ken Segall played a key role in Apple’s resurrection, helping to create such critical marketing campaigns as “Think Different” and naming the iMac.
The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle By Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard
A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
The ONE Thing has made more than 350 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 Wall Street Journal, NewYork Times, and USA Today. It won 12 book awards, has been translated into 27 languages, chosen as one of the Top 5 Business Books of 2013 by Hudson's Booksellers and one of Top 30 Business Books of 2013 by Executive Book Summaries. Voted one of Top 100 Business Books of All Time on Goodreads. People are using this simple, powerful concept to focus on what matters most in their personal and work lives. Companies are helping…
The Big Raise Why some fundraising chiefs are getting hefty pay increases By Joshua Hatch and Drew Lindsay
You might pity the fundraising bosses at America’s largest nonprofits. Their pay has inched up only about 2.7 percent over the past five years, according to GuideStar data on groups with annual revenue of $50 million or more.
Yet averages can be deceiving. Plenty of top fundraisers are getting big raises. To gauge how many, The Chronicle analyzed the pay of 260 top development officers at nonprofits that raise $35 million or more from private sources; these are individuals for whom at least three years of compensation figures are available from tax filings by their organizations…
Exceptional Wealth: Clear Strategies to Protect and Grow Your Net Worth by Mark Tepper
Are you a high net worth individual? Then the wealth management rules are different for you.
Mark Tepper rightly assures us that we should all consider ourselves wealthy if we have the resources to live the lives we want to live without compromise. However, if you fall into one of his higher-net-worth categories, you will find that Exceptional Wealth is speaking directly to you.
Tepper, author of the acclaimed Walk Away Wealthy, stresses that if you are someone…
The 5 Questions C-Level Candidates Should Ask In An Interview By Kimberly A. Whitler
After interviewing dozens of candidates over the years, there is one thing that still surprises me. It is the lack of thought put into the questions that candidates ask of interviewers. And those lacking preparation are not just at the entry level. Even executives treat this part of the interview with indifference. It's baffling that a candidate would respond to “what questions do you have for me” with “none” or “why did you join the company” (i.e., an obvious and somewhat pandering question)…
Sexual Harassment Is Widespread Problem for Fundraisers, Survey Shows By Timothy Sandoval
Donors are a big source of the sexual harassment that fundraisers face on the job, according to polling results released today by the Chronicle of Philanthropy and the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
Two-thirds of people who reported sexual harassment on the job blamed donors, while the rest said misconduct came from colleagues, mostly those in senior positions.
Donor-Centered Leadership - What it takes to build a high performance fundraising team By Penelope Burk
In Donor-Centered Leadership Penelope Burk tackles one of our most frustrating and costly problems - the high turnover rate of staff and the financial toll it takes on not-for-profits. In plain language, backed by compelling research with over 6,000 fundraisers, Board members, CEOs, and donors, Penelope reveals how not-for-profits can raise much more money by bringing staff attrition under control…
Lead From Anywhere: Your Fundraising Career By Karen Osborne
Every day we wake up believing we have the best jobs in the world. Really.
We get to see people at their best, when they are thinking about helping others, solving societal problems, saving and changing lives. We also meet amazing heroes, the people our organizations serve. We are in the philanthropy business and proud to be.
Winning the Talent Wars: How to Build a Lean, Flexible, High-Performance Workplace By Bruce Tulgan
"Bruce Tulgan is the new Tom Peters."―Howard Jenkins, chairman and CEO, Publix Super Markets, Inc.
Battered by waves of downsizing since the 1980s, talented men and women no longer seek job security from one company. This is the true hallmark of the new economy―not fleeting dot-coms and IPOs, but a fast-moving, free-agent workforce with the flexibility…
Your Strategy Needs a Strategy By Martin Reeves, Claire Love, Philipp Tillmanns
The oil industry holds relatively few surprises for strategists. Things change, of course, sometimes dramatically, but in relatively predictable ways. Planners know, for instance, that global supply will rise and fall as geopolitical forces play out and new resources are discovered and exploited. They know that demand will rise and fall with incomes, GDPs, weather conditions…
Wealth Secrets of the One Percent: A Modern Manual to Getting Marvelously, Obscenely Rich By Sam Wilkin
Discover how the superwealthy made it to the top (and you can too!)
From the richest Romans to the robber barons to today's bankers and tech billionaires, Sam Wilkin offers Freakonomics-esque insights into what it really takes to make a fortune. These stories of larger-than-life characters, strategies, and sacrifices reveal how the wealthiest did it, usually by a passion for finding loopholes, working around bureaucratic systems, and creating obstacles to competitors…
UnderDeveloped A national Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising By Jeanne Bell & Marla Cornelius
13 Things You Should Give Up If You Want To Be Successful By Zdravko Cvijetic
Sometimes, to become successful, and get closer to the person we can become, we don’t need to add more things, we need to give up on some of them.
There are certain things that are universal, which, if you give up on them, you will be successful, even though each one of us could have a different definition of success…
Succession: Mastering the Make-or-Break Process of Leadership Transition By Noel M. Tichy
Noel Tichy has been the trusted adviser on management succession to companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Nokia, Intel, Ford, and Mercedes Benz. Succession distills his decades of experience and provides a practical framework for building effective transition pipelines - for multi-billion dollar conglomerates, family businesses or anything in between…
Copy of A National Imperative: Joining Forces to Strengthen Human Services in America By George Morris and Dylan Roberts of Oliver Wyman
The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age Hardcover By David Callahan
Favorite Book Club of the Year (so far)
While media attention focuses on famous philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Charles Koch, thousands of donors are at work below the radar promoting a wide range of causes. David Callahan charts the rise of these new power players and the ways they are converting the fortunes of a second Gilded Age into influence. He shows how this elite works behind the scenes on education, the environment, science, LGBT rights, and many other issues…
$30 trillion is about to change hands in the US By MacKenzie Sigalos
There's a lot of money about to change hands in the U.S. — $30 trillion to be exact.
Baby boomers are the wealthiest generation in American history — and they're about to pass down those riches over the next few decades. It's the so-called great wealth transfer. But that exchange might not be as large as you had hoped if you don't take the right estate-planning steps…