WHEN IN DOUBT, ASK FOR MORE

A longtime nonprofit leader offers career and life lessons in this guide.

In Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind (2019), Counts provided a kind of detailed lesson plan for novice and experienced nonprofit managers alike. He recounted how he founded a humanitarian nonprofit organization and, through considerable self-reflection, shared knowledge gained from the experience. This book reprises what he discovered, transforming it into over 200 “lessons that I would have benefited from learning much earlier.” Clearly, this compendium is more about breadth than depth; the majority of the lessons are no more than snippets usually made up of just one paragraph. The volume is a smattering of rapid-fire truisms stretching across eight areas identified by simple graphic icons: “Board management,” “Fundraising,” “Leadership,” “People skills,” “Personal wellness,” “Public speaking,” “Running a meeting,” and “Travel.” But the individual lessons are presented alphabetically “to encourage serendipity.” Justifying this organizational strategy, Counts suggests: “Living life in a learning mode has exactly that kind of random rhythm to it.” True perhaps, but one wonders whether it might have been more useful to consolidate similar entries into their appropriate categories. Regardless, each tiny lesson is a self-contained, salient observation that shines a light on a specific aspect of leadership. A lesson may be broad (“Approachable, Being”), consultative (“Cultivating Donors: The Three-Week Rule”), or even philosophical (“Savoring Victories”). Whatever the subject, the author condenses a meaningful pronouncement into its simplest, most elegant form, using high-impact prose to make his point. He writes, for instance: “One of the most common leadership failings is misdiagnosing the cause of a problem by focusing on secondary issues rather than taking the time to dig down to root causes.” There are many applicable insights based on experience, such as “invite your senior staff to make occasional presentations during board meetings” so the directors seem less intimidating to these employees. Nonprofit leaders are likely to find the financial advice especially valuable, including “Never, ever ask for money apologetically or hesitantly,” and “Fundraisers are much more prone to ask for too little than for too much.”

Parceled out pearls of leadership wisdom.