Calendar Girl by Tricia Stewart

A couple of years ago I watched the movie, Calendar Girls, and thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, a group of fellow teachers and I could have been them. So, when I saw the pink and yellow paper back at the library last week I picked it up. Here is the fundraising case study to beat all. A bunch of friends suffered the death of one of their own from leukemia but not before they had invented a fun gimmick - sell a calendar of older women doing traditional women's crafts etc. but in the nude and give the proceeds to the leukemia society in England. The joke became a project. The project grew beyond anyone's wildest imagination and they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and gained media attention all over the world in the process. But, the project involved much more than any of the participants originally expected or intended. It cost relationships and produced new ones. Everyone was changed by the experience and the donors were more than delighted to get something of value - entertainment and emotional do-gooder-ness combined! The book reads like a very long personal letter from one of the calendar girls chronicling the experience like in a diary. If professional fund raisers like me could only activate this caliber of volunteers as the steering committee for the next events, the world would not lack funding for any humanitarian effort. This is a delightful read and honest about the work involved.

Stewart, Tricia, Calendar Girl, c. 2002, 2003. The Overlook Press.

Successful Grant Writing by Laura N. Gitlin and Kevin J. Lyons

If you ever have to write a government grant this book gives a thorough, if tedious, explanation of the process. It is written for academics who need to find funding for research, training projects, or demonstration grants. The authors started by illustrating their information with a personal anecdote but dropped it midway through the book. This is a dry technical manual that really does demystify the process of preparing, drafting, and receiving a federal grant for the health and human services fields.

Gitlin, Laura N. & Lyons, Kevin J., Successful Grant Writing: Strategies for Health and Human Services Professionals 2nd Edition, c. 2004, Springer Publishing Co.

The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre

Another novel that touches the real world in a way that confronts. John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener is a thriller of sorts - not terribly violent- really there were very few instances of gore but the violence indicated the level of greed and exploitation that the perpetrators were driven to keep hidden. This novel is set mostly in Africa where the political, commercial, and humanitarian agendas combine and sometimes conflict. Here the issue is whether a pharmaceutical company is falsifying and short circuiting the scientific review process for a new drug that is reputed to address a strain of tuburculosis that is resistant to standard antibiotics by making it available on a wide scale to the poor in Kenya. Is this a large scale medical experiment designed to work out any bugs in the product before making it available for sale in the West? Le Carre presents many faces of this dilemna while keeping the reader fascinated by the complicated relationships between the diverse characters who come from around the world. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, spent too many hours doing nothing but reading it, and also found some meat to chew on related to my work as a consultant to nonprofit organizations - some of whom work in just these kinds of communities.

One quote speaks of a consortium of representatives of donor nations in East Africa:
"It fosters efficacy, or effectiveness, in the aid field. In aid work, effectiveness is pretty much the gold standard. Compassion's a given,.....how much of each dollar from each donor nation actually reaches its target, and how much wasteful overlap and unhelpful competition exists between agencies on the ground. It grapples, as we all do, alas, with the aid world's three R's: reduplication, rivalry, rationalization. It balances overheads against productivity and...makes the odd tentative recommendation, given that...it has no executive powers and no powers of enforcement." (84)

For many them's fighting words because so many nonprofit organizations exist because of the passion, compassion, zeal, applied Christianity (or other faith based impulse) and altruism that motivates the founders. However, Le Carre has articulated a clarion call for humility, collaboration, and pragmatism that could bring real solutions to humanitarian crises wherever they exist.

So, here's a novel that is quite relevant to what I do although that's not what made me take it off the library shelf. I am grateful to have read it.

John Le Carre, The Constant Gardener, (c) 2001, Scribner. NY.

The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack

This Springfield, Missouri, manufacturing company is run using "the power of open-book management." This means that every employee has access to information about, investment in the ownership of, and genuine invitation to work towards the fiscal success of the company. By using the balance sheet and the projected income statement as weekly scoring guides and involving every employee in the weekly conversations to check whether every department is on track for the goals, the company has a team spirit that is going for the championship trophy i.e. significant bonuses and profit for all. Stack's easy to read book is common sense psychology at its best and it works a lot because of the respect he has for regular people to make choices that are wise if they have a stake in their outcomes. Treating the financial documents as the main way to score the game of business takes some of the fear factor away, I think. The growth of his company validates the approach.

Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business, c. 1992, 1994, Doubleday

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

This novel is a fascinating treatise about truth, tradition, faith, fraud, and failure set in a 14th century monastery in Italy. While the ideas are hidden in a Sherlock Holmes-esque mystery in which multiple corpses die in what seems to be an apocolyptic judgment (this is an elaborate red herring), the reader is forced to endure the pace, suspicions, fears, superstitions, and monotony of the life of a religious community as narrated by an adolescent Benedictine novice - the Watson to the Franciscan Sherlock. So, what benefit does a very long and sometimes tedious novel hold for business people in the 21st century? Hopefully this one engenders a humility of thought and a willingness to listen deeply to the people we encounter before attempting to superimpose on them our interpretations and conclusions. Perhaps one conclusion will be that our labyrinthan mental maps will be enhanced when the hidden things are shared with people whose opinions and ideas will likely challenge them. Or perhaps, otherwise, could our ideas be laced with a poison that we are prepared to serve the ones who probe more deeply out of their own intellectual or spiritual curiosity, passion, or desperate search? Or, are we so wedded to the idea of being right that we are prepared to sacrifice relationship with any who question us? Surely there is a truth that only can be revealed when it is vitally intertwined with love....

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, c. 1984 Harcourt Inc. (translated from the Italian)

Fundraising for Social Change 5th Edition by Kim Klein

As a nonprofit consultant much of what I do is to advise new, smaller, and transitioning nonprofit organizations on how to do fundraising, grant-seeking, and donor relations. Whether this involves a telephone solicitation campaign, prospecting for major donors or grants, creating material to market the organization or developing an endowment campaign to raise several million dollars, Kim Klein's Fundraising For Social Change covers it all. This book is long but no space is wasted on fluff. The samples - like a sample letter of agreement for an organization's board members- are practical, reasoned, and carefully explained. This book is a MUST READ for every nonprofit fundraiser, board member, executive director or founder.

Fundraising for Social Change by Kim Klein, (c) 2007. Jossey-Bass.

God's Politics by JIm Wallis

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It- A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America,by Jim Wallis, challenges American politics and the American church like nothing I have read since Mark Hatfield's Between A Rock and A Hard Place from 1973. Wallis defines the prophetic imperative of Biblical faith as follows: get a vision of where the wind needs to be blowing and then to change the direction of the wind so it blows there. He asserts that God is always "personal" but never "private" and calls for a public discourse of faith that follows the models of Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah and their ilk. He reminds us that their public prophetic subjects were almost always political: poverty, single women, children, the nations, fraud, debt, greed.... He calls for a fourth political philosophy- conservative on social issues and for social justice. For Wallis, a budget is a moral document. This book, written in 2005, is even more compelling in the light of our current global circumstances. Perhaps too long, perhaps it should have been written as several shorter, more focused treatises, this book needs to become part of America's public debate as we move towards a new presidential election, as the earth shakes, wars continue, and the world's markets lose stability.

God's Politics, by Jim Wallis, (c) 2005, Harper Collins

The Game-Changer by AG Lafley and Ram Charan

Using the stories from Proctor and Gamble, Lego, DuPont and many other businesses whose corporate culture and bottom line have been reconfigured to embrace, reward, stimulate, and grow from innovation, this book describes the process of innovation. It is full of practical wisdom that anyone could implement to move towards a systematic culture of innovation. Read this to learn how to evaluate the comparable risk and reward of suggested innovations when looking short-term, mid-term, and long-term. The authors view failed innovations as stepping stones to successful ones especially when the written reflections explains why things failed. A lot of emphasis is given to how to "create a social process" that fosters innovation and to how to assign criteria, i.e. the metrics of innovation. Great insight is provided about the necessary attributes of the members and the leaders of innovation teams.

What grabbed my attention as a strategy that I can adapt to my role as a consultant to nonprofit organizations who contributes significantly to strategic planning to build organizational capacity is the description of Proctor and Gamble's "Innovation Gym". This is a dedicated space that teams (in my case nonprofit boards) can visit to achieve specific goals related to problems that will be solved through innovation. The facilitators that run the Innovation Gym provide unusual resources and activities that are designed to stimulate creative solutions and connect the expertise of participants from very different backgrounds. This approach is very relevant to the work of nonprofit organizations who are committed to creating solutions for serious social problems and for the funders who are dedicated to provide "venture" capital that allow these solutions to be tried.

A Game-Changer is an innovation that opens a new "frontier"- and brings new options that totally change the way everyone does something. A cell phone and the invention of plastic, for instance, are two examples of game-changing innovations. Making the hunt for either "disruptive" or "incremental" innovations part of the daily work at a company causes an organic growth potential to ensure its future.

I highly recommend this book as an idea stimulator for anyone.


Lafley, A.G. and Charan, Ram, The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation. (c) 2008. Crown Business. New York.