Quick Thoughts: The Jossey Bass Handbook of Nonprofits

This book, in its third edition, was the assigned text for both my classes in my MBA program for introduction to nonprofits and  board management.

For the intro class, I was assigned to read the whole thing in eight weeks, which I did. During that class, we covered up to four chapters a week for an eight week class, so there was not a lot of retention going on except for the areas I had flagged for use in my discussions and papers.

I had to read fewer chapters for the next class, and I think that was where the book shined. Reading some of the chapter in a more in-depth manner suited both me and the text. I say this because for the most part the book’s chapters are a fairly deep introduction to the subject they cover, and in spite of worrying that the book and the class wouldn’t be applicable to me since I have worked in nonprofits for five years, I learned a lot. The structure of the book is that it has chapters written by subject matter experts, so there is some inconsistency in the voice of the text, but that is eclipsed by the expertise that it brought to bear on the individual subjects covered. And there are a lot of subjects covered. It is a thick, long book with a lot of type on each page, so it is not a quick read, but it is well worth it as it is broad and fairly deep. I pulled my copy because I think I can pass it off to one of my subordinates in hopes that it might teach and inspire her about the entire context of the work we do.