|
[Printer Friendly Version]
Top Ten Civil Society Books of 2006
By Michael C. Gilbert, February 22nd, 2007
We're continuing our series of "top ten" lists as part of our celebration of the ten year anniversary of Nonprofit Online News. Today, we're publishing my personal favorites among the books I reviewed last year. Several of these are available for free online and none of them are very expensive. The selection leans toward those books that could have the largest impact on your strategic thinking.
Joan Roberts is a terrifically clear-headed and visionary consultant from Toronto. Her book-- Alliances, Coalitions, and Partnerships -- is one of the best on the subject of collaboration that I have read. Her strengths include the practicality of her taxonomies and her head-on examination of the topic of power and control. She looks closely both at concrete models and systems of inter-organzational collaboration, as well as the tools and capacities needed with an organization, in order for it to succeed as a collaborator. We need these ideas if we, as a sector, are going to transition successfully into the era of networks.
A number of years ago, a dear friend and colleague of mine and I started work on a book entitled Selling Out. We wanted to understand why so many activists don't sustain their work over a lifetime. We decided along the way that we needed to study people who had not given up, in order to determine what was different. The research never got funded, but I'm pleased to see that the team of Daloz, Keen, Keen, and Parks did. They published their results in the (far more positively titled) book Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitments in a Complex World. In order to choose the people they studied, they developed these four criteria: (1) commitment to the common good, (2) perseverance and resilience, (3) ethical congruence between life and work, and (4) engagement with diversity and complexity. The causal themes they discovered are revealed in some of their chapter titles: connection & complexity, community, compassion, courage, confession, and commitment. Originally published in 1996, I didn't read this book until it was given to me by a colleagues at the University of Michigan in 2003. It helped me decide to return to doing personal counseling and it helped reground me in my own work. I highly recommend it.
Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is available for free online in numerous different forms. This book has plenty to love and plenty to hate, but it's deep, rich, and goes far beyond the superficial rhetoric of most contemporary debates that are a reflection of its issues. This is a book that can serve as the basis for discussions that can help remake civil society in the age of networks.
Katrin Verclas recommended Eric Von Hippel's book Democratizing Innovation last week and now I want to recommend it to you, in turn. It's a great companion book to Lessig's Future of Ideas, but it has its own critically valuable points to make, particularly in the way it lays out a vision of user driven innovation. I believe the nonprofit sector is at best ambivalent about empowering stakeholders and with regard to innovation, often we don't even really know what we mean by the term. There are several chapters of Hippel's book that could help our sector sort out its confusion: Innovation Communities, Toolkits for User Innovation and Custom Design, and Linking User Innovation to Other Phenomena and Fields.
Robert Helvey's book On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: Thinking About the Fundamentals (189 page PDF) is available as a free download from the Einstein Institute. Funded in 2002 through a grant from the U.S. Institute of Peace, the book is a powerful primer in one of the most important and powerful unifying strategies of modern times. It teaches rigorous thinking about power relations and provides clear guidance for those who are seeking an effective sense of direction in these troubling times.
I was telling a colleague yesterday my thoughts on how branding, organizational focus, and story telling are intertwined, and about the power of blogging to enroll others in your story. So, it seems like a good time to recommend Storytelling: Branding in Practice by Fog, Budtz, and Yakaboylu. The book is best consumed whole, but some of the most interesting chapters include: Authentic Raw Material for Story Telling, Story Telling in Management, When Story Telling Becomes Dialogue, and Tearing Down the Walls. In addition to its role in branding, organizational story telling is the key to my own communication planning methodologies. It's an incredibly powerful way to identify the key strategies and strengths on which you want to build both ICT and new tactics. This book is both wise and practical and I recommend it to anyone who has to think about the big picture of their organization.
Guy Kawasaki's book The Art of the Start lives up to its subtitle: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything. It embraces a kind of empowering, even liberating realism that I have always loved myself and which Kawasaki simply oozes. If you're going to be unrealistic in your goals (and in a way, all of us who want to make the world better are "unrealistic"), then you better face the truth head on in every aspect of your implementation. This book has chapters devoted to each of those aspects: Positioning, Pitching, Planning, Bootstrapping, Recruiting, Fundraising, Partnering, Branding, and Rainmaking. It concludes with a chapter on the Art of Being a Mensch. What a delightful and practical book! I should also mention that Guy Kawasaki will be keynoting the Nonprofit Technology Conference, coming up in Seattle on March 23-24, 2006.
I have been working on a series of in-depth articles for our journal on the subject of nonprofit knowledge management. In the course of that writing, I have gone back and reviewed some of my favorite books on the subject. Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart, by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day, is one such book. I appreciate their efforts to get people to focus on "know-why" before they focus on "know-how". If you look at the agendas of the conferences in our field, you can understand their concern: We tend to brush over such issues as measurable objectives and requirements development, let alone developing our understanding of our communication contexts. This book emphasizes systems thinking and strategic questions. I particularly recommend the chapters on Framing Conversations about Technology, Nurturing Home Grown Expertise, and How to Evolve Information Ecologies.
I was inspired years ago by the asset mapping techniques of John McKnight, who believed that urban communities needed to build on their strengths, rather than on their needs. More than a decade ago, he and John Kretzmann wrote a book called Building Communities from the Inside Out, which I would like to recommend to you today. All of their techniques, from "releasing individual capacities" to "capturing local institutions for community building" can be leveraged to great effect with online communication. New technology has dramatically lowered the cost of asset mapping and asset based organizing, but even projects specifically related to new technology seem to be dragged down by needs assessments and the like. This book is full of fantastic tools and resources which I recommend to any planner, organizer, or online community builder.
Thich Nhat Hanh, poet, peace activist, and zen master, lives, teaches, writes in the Plum Village community, a meditation center in southern France. The role of community in an engaged spiritual life interests me profoundly, so of course I had to read Friends on the Path, compiled by Jack Lawlor, with essays by Thich Nhat Hanh and others. The language used is Buddhist of course and so it might be inaccessible to those whose spiritual or cultural background doesn't leave them open to it. But the concepts and lessons are powerful and universal. The book is a great balance of case studies, principles, and practices, including building intergenerational community, creating refuge, starting communities, and nurturing a mindful culture.
If you found this article interesting or helpful,
please consider making a donation to Nonprofit Online News.
It will probably feel good!
|
|
RSS