For your reading list – Innovation and Scaling for Impact

This summer, I served on the Terry McAdam Book Award Committee of the Alliance for Nonprofit Management.

The Terry McAdam Book Award is given annually. It honors an innovative book that advances the field of non-profit capacity building. Books chosen for review have been published in the last two years, are not textbooks and are available commercially.

And the 2017 winner is:

Innovation and Scaling for Impact by Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair. Stanford University Press.

The authors examine these two concepts in more detail, making important distinctions between them.

Here’s what the review Committee said about this book:

 

“In their eye-opening book, Seelos and Mair bring clarity to the differences between innovation and scaling, as well as the relationship of one to the other. While still encouraging levels of appropriate risk, they argue persuasively that nonprofits should focus far more resources on scaling programs they know have positive outcomes than on innovating where uncertainty about outcomes could drain resources.

“The authors provide guidance and worksheets to help leaders determine where innovation is appropriate. They identify types and levels of uncertainty, and incorporate lessons learned. They also emphasize the importance of scaling successful innovations for the benefit of an organization’s constituents. While case studies focus on larger international NGOs, leaders of smaller and domestic nonprofits will also find this book valuable.”

Past winners have included some books you may know:

• The Sustainability Mindset: Using the Matrix Map to Make Strategic Decisions by Steve Zimmerman and Jeanne Bell
• Content Marketing for Nonprofits: A Communications Map for Engaging Your Community, Becoming a Favorite Cause, and Raising More Money by Kivi Leroux Miller
• Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World by Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye Paine

It was a privilege to serve on the committee. The choice of a winner was not easy as there were quite a number of valuable books. Over the next few weeks I’ll share a few other books you might want to put on your reading list.