When Boards have recurring problems, such as poor attendance, low participation, high turnover of members, or increasing conflicts, here’s a quick process that I’ve used successfully to “jump start” recovery. Sure, the steps aren’t all of those needed for complete Board development — those steps would produce a blog post about 25 pages long. But …

Finding a good business plan book can be overwhelming. Type “business planning guide” into Amazon and you’ll get almost 5000 citations. Your local bookstore or library is more selective, but it’s still hard to sort through them. And, truth be told, there’s no one book for everybody. So, for that reason, we’ve listed the “best” …

There used to be hard-and-fast rules as to what was, or wasn’t, a special event. Today, everything gets that label, from a small cocktail reception, to a board lunch, to a Gala Auction for 1,000. Nonprofits think special events are cool and a great way to raise money, but they’re only partially right. Events are …

My twice-monthly newsletter, Crisis Manager, is distributed by email and then is archived indefinitely at my website, where the crisis manager newsletter page gets brisk traffic second only to my home page. I welcome guest authors who would like to get some promotional value out of being exposed to my readers. The criteria: The article …

My grandmother was born in an ethnic neighborhood of Chicago in 1900 and had never seen a live cow growing up. In first grade her class was given cut-out farm animals and told to trace and color them. She had a cow to draw and painted it purple because she liked the color purple. The …

It’s well established in Dr. John Gray’s best-selling book, Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, that males and females communicate differently when trying to relate to each other on different levels. While it’s a slippery slope in the universe of communications to equate this gender-based metaphor to the public relations arena, slide with …

The challenges facing Paul Levy, the embattled CEO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, highlight the issues faced by many leaders: once in hot water, how to start on the road to recovery. The problem is that many leaders don’t appreciate the nature of the ethics risks they face and what is in fact …

What type of highly confidential information do you store on your mobile device? Contacts who would hate to see their information shared with spammers or identity thefts? Passwords? Photos or videos you or others wouldn’t appreciate appearing on YouTube? Text messages flirting with someone who isn’t your spouse? It’s an odd quirk of human behavior …

Which of the following statements about a jury, civil or criminal, are true? Prospective jury members never lie regarding their advance bias about a case. Jury members are always truly “peers” of the defendant. Jury members never talk about a case outside of jury deliberations, or read and watch TV about a case when sequestered, …

Reason’s whole pleasure, all the joys of sense, Lie in three words — health, peace, and competence. ~ Alexander Pope Alexander Pope penned those lines of iambic pentameter in the first half of the 1700s. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard them from a stressed-out 21st century nonprofit executive director. Imagine the conversation. …