LEAP UPDATES
Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes. 
--Peter Drucker
Each month, we publish a Leap of Reason Update to share insights, tools, and learning opportunities for those who are working to raise their performance.
The Wisdom of WINS Leaders
We have a term for foundation professionals who previously ran nonprofits: WINS leaders. WINS stands for “Walked In Nonprofit Shoes.” We believe WINS leaders have a big and important role to play in helping peer funders understand how they can better set their grantees up for success. As a case in point, please take a…
What Funders and Surgeons Have in Common
It’s rare that a single piece of writing can profoundly alter your mindset. It happened to us in 2013 when the Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article “Slow Ideas,” gave us a novel way of thinking about the unsexy cause we had been struggling to advance for decades: encouraging grantmakers to dispense with conventional…
Ask Not
Joe Biden is no Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, so we were genuinely surprised that we felt so inspired by his Inaugural Address. At several moments, Biden set aside lofty oratory and stopped trying to emulate the muscular delivery of previous Presidents. In those quieter moments, we felt the true empathy and compassion Biden brings…
The Reads That Rocked Our World
In an effort to close out this hellish year on a high note, we put our heads together (virtually, of course) to create a list of the six books that sparked the most insights for us. Not all of these wonderful works came out in 2020; in some cases, we were embarrassingly late to the…
Half Empty is OK, But Full Disdain is Not
If we were to assemble America’s red and blue bubbles into a national Venn diagram, we wouldn’t see a lot of intersection on issues like pandemic response, but we would see big overlap in the realm of emotions. Disbelief. Suspicion. Anger. Fear. Exhaustion. Following this bitter election season, we all have some or all of…