Ten short books, made from the blog.

Part One · The case for asking

1. In Defense of Raising Money: a Manifesto for NonProfit CEOs
2. Is fundraising the same thing as sales?
3. Let’s trade in these old stories
4. Each and every dollar
5. Jeff Immelt was a sales guy
6. Is “fundraising” a dirty word?
7. How do you find a great Head of Development?

Part Two · Making the ask

1. The big ask
2. Your ‘ask’ is not ‘by the way’
3. Blah blah blah blah Ginger
4. 20 questions every fundraiser must be able to answer
5. Getting Fundraising Right

Part Three · How the money moves

1. Time to outsource fundraising?
2. The inefficient nonprofit marketplace
3. Why overhead ratios are meaningless for Kiva and Acumen Fund
4. Kiva Customers Don’t Receive the Loans you Give
5. How philanthropists really decide where to give
6. Should foundation program officers be more like venture capitalists? (Part 1 of 2)
7. Should foundation program officers be more like venture capitalists? (Part 2 of 2)

Part One · The experiment

1. Generosity experiment
2. Generosity experiment revisited
3. Reflections on Maimonides’ 8 levels of Charity (tzedakah)
4. Generosity economy
5. 3 Thoughts on Generosity
6. The long, hard, stupid way

Part Two · Generosity Day

1. Rebooting Valentine’s Day
2. Generosity Day
3. Generosity Day – first reflections
4. Generosity Day – in graphs
5. Generosity Q&A

Part Three · Who is helping whom

1. Another Hero I’ve Never Met
2. Layers
3. Mariano Rivera on Luck vs Skill
4. Five Dollars
5. Close to the Bone
6. Who Walks Whom?

Part One · Leading yourself

1. How do I learn?
2. Full and hopeful conviction
3. Strategy and Conviction
4. Proactive vs reactive
5. Listening with intent to change
6. Fast, Intentional, and Grounded

Part Two · Leading others

1. Project leader or project doer
2. Ensemble
3. Leaders Operate in a Low Gravity Environment
4. Can Can’t Will Won’t and 3-D Management
5. The Manager Self-Projection Trap
6. Right Action, Right Results

Part Three · Culture and hiring

1. Culture Graphs
2. Teamwork, partnership, culture, and passing the ball
3. The spirit of service
4. Open Mondays, Open Fridays
5. How we Support Each Other
6. Expectations
7. One Unpleasant, Required Job for any CEO

Part One · What they’re really buying

1. Brand
2. What are your customers (donors) really buying?
3. What Comes First in Selling?
4. Unapologetic and generous

Part Two · Stories

1. The Body Shop: when stories fall short
2. Ganz – Why Stories Matter
3. The story-reality gap
4. Carrots and marketing to the poor
5. Seven Words

Part Three · Being heard

1. To Whom Am I Speaking
2. Don’t take it personally
3. Make it Twice as Easy
4. New York’s #1 Luxury Wedding Violinist

Part One · Where new ideas come from

1. Ingredients for an Innovative Culture
2. Einstein’s Intuition
3. (Hamilton-inspired) Time for Synthesis
4. The Spelling Bee Forum and Our Best New Ideas
5. New isn’t all new
6. Crazy Idea List

Part Two · Testing what you think

1. The Lean Nonprofit
2. Every project has a marshmallow
3. The power and limits of controlled experiments
4. FDR and persistent experimentation
5. My toothbrush was good enough
6. The Social Entrepreneur Product-Market Fit Paradox

Part Three · Making room for the new

1. Innovation isn’t really like apple pie
2. The core skill of innovators
3. Potshotters
4. Your idea
5. Strong ideas, loosely held
6. Why I Don’t Have a Five-Year Plan

Part One · Getting started

1. Use AI to do Just One Job
2. Use AI to Turn Meetings into Action
3. Learning to Work with Claude CoWork
4. Tips on Running an AI Hackathon
5. The Global Majority Data Project

Part Two · Expertise

1. My AI Physical Therapist
2. The 90 Percent Expert

Part Three · Writing and trust

1. Is “Polished” Writing a Good Thing?
2. The Problem with AI Writing
3. More Typos, Please
4. EWIMO writing
5. On AI-generated content, trust, and gatekeepers

Part One · Impact investing

1. FastCompany thinks social impact investing is a crock (with a long aside on cellphones)
2. The third pocket
3. Two sigmoid curves
4. Below market
5. When Can Impact Investing Create Real Impact?
6. What impact investing can learn from Vanguard’s 7x Growth
7. The quantum mechanics of intentions

Part Two · Listening

1. The power of belief
2. The Lean Nonprofit
3. Lean Data Goes Deeper
4. Why We Need Impact Performance Data
5. Just Listening
6. The Greatest Unmanaged Risk in Fintech
7. Announcing the Launch of 60 Decibels

Part One · Starting

1. Initiate
2. Commit publicly
3. Say it out loud
4. Out loud
5. One Person

Part Two · Fear

1. Linchpin: Are you Indispensable?
2. Like a Match to our Fears
3. Gifts – The Icarus Deception
4. The humanity ante

Part Three · How change happens

1. The Six Stages of Kevin Kelly
2. Small changes, big changes
3. The work we choose not to do
4. Resolutions and Priorities

Part One · How learning works

1. Peter Drucker – Managing Oneself
2. Fifty Pounds of Clay
3. 20-80-100 and Adjacent Possibility
4. How do I learn?
5. Which skills are you practicing?
6. Attaining excellence

Part Two · Practice

1. Work really hard
2. What Terry Laughlin Taught me about Swimming and Mastery
3. Afraid of the Dark
4. The Difference Between Discomfort and Injury
5. Sight Reading
6. Fretting

Part Three · Getting better at getting better

1. Strengths, and Weaknesses
2. Willing to be Bad
3. Quality is Non-Linear
4. The Expert Expends Less Effort

Part One · Why blog

1. 44 reasons I blog
2. What I Talk About When I Talk About Blogging
3. 1,000
4. + Audience
5. The only blogging advice I have ever taken
6. Your Point of View

Part Two · The habit

1. Labor versus work
2. Where do Blog Posts Come From?
3. A little bit every day
4. The problem with skipping Tuesday
5. The Confidence to Cut
6. Charles Darwin on Why We Write

Part Three · Saying it plainly

1. Orwell on Un-slovenly Thoughts
2. Start with the punchline, please
3. Explaining complexity with a good analogy
4. Three email rules and the bcc courtesy
5. The Problem with Jargon
6. Explain it Simply