A comprehensive, actionable guide for rethinking nonprofit organizations, especially their boards.
A guide to understanding and managing nonprofit arts organizations.
The author has extensive experience with theater companies, including productions at Lincoln Center, the Pittsburgh Public Theater, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Seattle Repertory Theatre, and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and he puts that experience to good use here. Harrison contends that the organizational structure of nonprofit boards should be reexamined and notes that leadership strategies that may have worked in the 1970s aren’t viable today. It’s time to start from scratch, he says. After chapters about why boards need to change and the necessity of effective fundraising, the author gets to the crux of his book, which consists of the five responsibilities of nonprofit arts boards: defining a mission, fundraising, choosing an executive director, recruiting other board members, and advocating for the organization. He discusses the importance of studying other organizations and understanding how a board should govern. Finally, Harrison acknowledges that any list of best practices, including his own, may not work for all organizations, and one’s community’s needs should take precedence over all else. He has an easy, engaging style and does more than complain about nonprofit boards (although there’s plenty to complain about): He provides a usable blueprint for how to start, reconfigure, and run a board. “Harrison’s Rules of Order” covers how to conduct efficient meetings and outlines six rules (e.g., “Don’t waste the money you’ve budgeted for board meetings by talking about items that you cannot change”) that will help any arts board meeting—and other boards, as well—run more smoothly. Also included are exercises for boards to tackle together, which are sometimes based on real-life situations. For instance, the author recalls one particularly heinous conversation with a racist board member and asks readers whether he handled the situation well. This is a great starting point for any organization looking to run more smoothly.
A comprehensive, actionable guide for rethinking nonprofit organizations, especially their boards.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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