Posts by Beth Owens

Recently a colleague was eating at a Smith & Wollensky’s steak house and saw a giant banner apprising diners that 2012 is “The Year of the Steak.” If Smith & Wollensky’s can unilaterally appropriate a whole year to market a product that my doc has all but banned from my diet, then there’s no reason…

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to follow the KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Stupid—more often. I’ll try to put that principle to use in this update, given how many developments in the Leap of Reason community we want to highlight this month. First, we want to share some concrete ideas for how boards, foundations,…

With this month’s update, we are pleased to share a detailed summary of the “Tough Times, Creative Measures” symposium Urban Institute hosted in October to exploreLeap of Reason’s key themes. The all-star participants shared great insights into the lack of support in the nonprofit community for data-driven management, human-capital development, and performance cultures. And they…

For those of you who are new to our monthly Leap of Reason updates, welcome to the community. For those of you who have been part of this journey for a while, thank you for all that you’re doing to spread the word. Thanks to the power of your networks, 23,000 copies of the book…

I feel compelled to start this month’s update with my thanks to a growing group of organizations that are generously helping us learn from their experiences taking the “leap of reason.” In recent weeks, we have benefited greatly from site visits to Congreso de Latinos Unidos (Philadelphia) and Roca (Chelsea, MA). In the coming weeks, we’ll…

Before I share some heartening examples of the ways that the Leap of Reason message is rippling out into new communities, I want to share a disheartening personal story that I hope will embolden others to be a strong voice of reason on the boards they serve. When I first stepped into the nonprofit sector, I…

We had expected the last weeks of summer to be quiet, but they turned out to be anything but. In addition to endorsements from thought leaders Lucy Bernholz andBeth Kanter and a lot of requests for the book from organizations that are gearing up for fall planning sessions, Leap of Reason was reviewed in Businessweek.com…

One year ago this week, a close colleague and I drafted a plan to “create a readable monograph that presents a compelling case for managing for impact, distribute it to the majority of nonprofit executives and boards with a predisposition to manage with rigor, and work to make the monograph a priority read for this…

The volume of high-quality, substantive feedback on Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity continues to surprise and impress us. Out of respect for your time, I’ll keep this communication short and offer just a few highlights from the past few weeks. If you have an appetite for more details on…

It has been an affirming and gratifying seventeen days since we launched Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity. The early feedback has been quite positive—in fact, materially better than we had envisioned. As part of our own process of managing to the outcomes we established for this book, we’re writing…