High Performance Nonprofit Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact

Good coverage of the topic. An easy-to-read format with good examples to illustrate the principles and/or concepts. The authors are american and are writing from an american perspective with all the examples based in the US. While most of the principles are transferable to the canadian situation, it is not a crisp as if canadian examples would have been included. This singular focus did take away from the impact that the book had for me and my area of interest.

This is the best treatment I've seen of the barriers nonprofit leaders have in implementing high performance strategies in a nonprofit organization. The authors rightly point to the convergence of the bias of funders and nonprofit leaders to only invest in programs and not organizational performance improvement. They present a well-researched case that this mono-focus on investing in new programs and not the structural needs of nonprofits results in less than desireable outcomes. Our intention at the Center for Excellence in Nonprofits is to use this book to help educate the philanthropic community and nonprofit leaders in the need to better balance the altruistic urge to use every penny for client service with the need to develop the internal capacity of these organizations to continously improve their deliver systems.

A great, thought-provoking look at non-profits with helpful, action-oriented examples and clear writing. What I like about this work is its focus on building organizational capacity - both as funded and prioritized by the organization itself and through foundation support. The authors provide the insight that non-profits all too often focus exclusively on expanding their program offerings without providing for the needed organizational capacity to really pull them off. As a non-profit manager, it helped me to think through the capacity challenges we face everyday - and to think of how to create opportunities for both management and foundation support for capacity building.The ideas they espouse will change the world of non-profits by helping to make them financially and structurally sound, while achieving high performance mission-driven results - if we listen!A great book! Read it! Enjoy it!