The Ask - How to Ask for Support for Your Nonprofit Cause, Creative Project, or Business Venture

Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic reveals for the first time how this complex service organization fosters a culture that exceeds customer expectations and earns deep loyalty from both customers and employees. Service business authority Leonard Berry and Mayo Clinic marketing administrator Kent Seltman explain how the Clinic implements and maintains its strategy, adheres to its management system, executes its care model, and embraces new knowledge - invaluable lessons for managers and service providers of all industries.

Drs. Berry and Seltman had the rare opportunity to study Mayo Clinic's service culture and systems from the inside by conducting personal interviews with leaders, clinicians, staff, and patients, as well as observing hundreds of clinician-patient interactions. The result is a book about how the Clinic's business concept produces stellar clinical results, organizational efficiency, and interpersonal service.

By examining the operating principles that guide every management decision at this legendary healthcare institution, the authors

• Demonstrate how a great service brand evolves from the core values that nourish and protect it
• Extrapolate instructive business lessons that apply outside healthcare
• Illustrate the benefits of pooling talent and encouraging teamwork
• Relate historical events and perspectives to the present-day Mayo Clinic
• Share inspiring stories from staff and patients

An innovative analysis of this exemplary institution, Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic presents a proven prescription for creating sustainable service excellence in any organization.

You are a leader. You do not need to be in a boardroom, on a battlefield, or on a ballot to have a profound impact on everyone around you. In this life-changing book, Betsy Myers—senior adviser to two US presidents and former executive director of Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership—demonstrates how each of us has opportunities to take the lead every day and shares seven core principles that will enable us to be more productive, engaged, and successful.

From the Oval Office to the playground, cabinet meetings to kitchen tables, in public life and private, Betsy Myers has seen firsthand the emergence of a new leadership model where having all the answers up front is less important than asking the right questions, where strength is derived less from the power you wield than from how you make the people around you feel.

With personal stories from her time in government, in academia, and on the campaign trail, as well as her experiences as a wife, daughter, and mother, Myers helps all of us learn to set the right priorities for ourselves; to connect on a deeper level with the people around us; to uncover problems early when they are still easy to fix; to collaborate with those whose points of view are different from our own; and to push through our fears and live our most authentic lives. Myers demonstrates that more than simply making people feel good, this kind of leadership can have a profound effect on the results achieved: it is how initiatives are launched, profits are made, and work gets done.

Simply put: Nonprofits have no leverage. No one has to make a donation. And since most donors have no direct stake in the organizations they support, they make donations out of the goodness of their hearts. If donors feel like writing a check, they will. If they don't, they won't.

The End of Fundraising turns fundraising on its head, teaching nonprofits how to stop begging for charity and start selling impact.

For the first time, nonprofits have economic power. We live in a new era where consumers, businesses, investors, employees, and service providers attach real economic value to social outcomes. An era where yesterday's "feel good" issues—education, the environment, health care, the arts, and animal rights—now have direct economic consequences and opportunities. Nonprofits now have leverage. To use this leverage, nonprofits must learn how to "sell" their impact to a new set of stakeholders.

Using his fifteen years of experience advising the world's leading nonprofits, foundations, and corporations, Jason Saul reveals the formula for how nonprofits transcend the paradigm of charitable fundraising and reach true financial sustainability. Specifically, this groundbreaking book offers nonprofit professionals a guide to

• Understand the role of social change in our economy
• Capture and communicate impact in simple, compelling terms
• Identify the new market stakeholders that value nonprofit outcomes
• Create powerful value propositions to increase leverage
• Improve the success of a nonprofit's pitches to funders

And she remembers waking up in heaven. For most of Crystal’s broken life, she felt utterly beyond the reach of God— if God was even real. Then came December 10—and the nine minutes that changed everything. Waking Up in Heaven invites readers along on a journey to witness the relentless pursuit of God in a life that was shattered and seemingly beyond hope, an awe-inspiring account of love, forgiveness, and redemption, and the healing power of God’s presence.

Ian Brown’s son Walker is one of only about 300 people worldwide diagnosed with cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome—an extremely rare genetic mutation that results in unusual facial appearance, the inability to speak, and a compulsion to hit himself constantly. At age thirteen, he is mentally and developmentally between one and three years old and will need constant care for the rest of his life.

Heartbreaking and wicked: a memoir of  stunning beauty and remarkable grace. Improbable friendships and brushes with death. A schoolgirl affecting the course of aboriginal politics. Elvis and cocktails and Catholicism and the secrets buried deep beneath a place that may be another, undiscovered Love Canal – Lewiston, New York. Too Close to the Falls is an exquisite, haunting return, through time and memory, to the heart of Catherine Gildiner’s childhood.

And what a childhood it was …