Editor’s Note: Our foundation helped International Partners in Mission (IPM) create its “international immersion experience” program as a way to generate unrestricted revenue in order to sustain and expand its mission impact – a great example of a nonprofit being market-driven and “finding a need and filling it.” Our Managing Director, Bill Leamon, is taking a group of students from Notre Dame College to Nicaragua (the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere) with IPM next spring, and he recommended this book to me. I found the explanation of dependent economies (where most of the effort goes into goods for export rather than goods for local consumption) very enlightening, along with gaining a better understanding of how much our foreign policy towards Nicaragua (an American, William Walker, was even its President from 1856-57) has shaped the country’s governance, as well as contributed to its dismal impoverishment.

Editor’s Note: I never “got” the Grateful Dead as so many of my friends did. But since the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is opening a new exhibit to them this month, I’ll share my favorite of their many songs. Maybe it has more meaning but to me it’s just a light, good melody and harmony and fun lyrics.

"What gets measured gets done, what gets measured and fed back gets done well, what gets rewarded gets repeated." John E. Jones

Editor’s Note: It’s hard to be reminded of the Holocaust, especially when I think I was born only seven years after it ended. It’s not like so many things–ancient history. And so I was glad when my daughter-in-law suggested that I read it. Hitler and Himmler and their “human experiment” are not as distant as we’d like to think.

Editor’s Note: I recently saw to my surprise that 71 year old Baez is still performing and very active in rights movements and so I dedicate this, one of her most famous early performances from 1963, as this month’s song.

“That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” 

Editor’s Note: Steve Rothschild, former executive vice president of General Mills and founder of Twin Cities RISE!, a nonprofit that works to advance anti-poverty programs, offers a useful case study of the challenges and successes RISE! has experienced, with a view to providing a management guide for other nonprofit leaders to follow. I especially liked the book's honest portrayal of the early difficulties that RISE! faced, especially the process the organization went through to achieve focus, and the steps it took to overcome the natural tendency of most philanthropists to try to do too much too fast.

Editor’s Note: It's hard to believe it’s been over ten years since George Harrison, my favorite Beatle, passed away. Hearing his solo stuff, especially this song, always puts me in a good place.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you do the sort of work you have taken on, you must face the fact that your work may apparently be worthless. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate on the value, the rightness and the truth of the work itself.”

Editor’s Note: I worked in an Interpublic Group advertising agency from 1979 to 1987. And so I was on Madison Avenue after the period covered by AMC’s hit show, Mad Men. If you hope this book is about the television show or contains salacious content as the show does, you will be disappointed. It is instead an intelligent review of the period the show covers, often referred to as the “golden age of advertising.” Cracknell himself spent 40 years in the business as a writer and creative director so his words mean more than an observer. If you have interest in the business of advertising, this is a nice history of the business with special focus on the “creative revolution” of the 60’s, the period covered by Don Draper and his colleagues in the TV show. I respect the ad business more than most because when it’s done well, as it was in the two agencies I worked for, it is a valiant and constant struggle between creativity and business discipline. The excerpt below, from the book’s epilogue, reflects my feelings about the current state of the art.