Sally Osberg

Former President and CEO, Skoll Foundation

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Book Recommendations:

Recommended by Sally Osberg

Social Startup Success is an important read for aspiring social entrepreneurs. (from Amazon)

With business advice from an expert entrepreneur, learn how to identify and leverage the key factors that will bring sustainability and success to your startup. Kathleen Kelly Janus, a lecturer at the Stanford University Program on Social Entrepreneurship and the founder of the successful social enterprise Spark, set out to investigate what makes a startup succeed or fail. She surveyed more than 200 high-performing social entrepreneurs and interviewed dozens of founders. Social Startup Success shares her findings for the legions of entrepreneurs working for social good, revealing how the best organizations get over the revenue hump. How do social ventures scale to over $2 million, Janus's clear benchmark for a social enterprise's sustainability? Janus, tapping into strong connections to the Silicon Valley world where many of these ventures are started or and/or funded, reveals insights from key figures such as DonorsChoose founder Charles Best, charity:water's Scott Harrison, Reshma Saujani of Girls Who Code and many others. Social Startup Success will be social entrepreneurship's essential playbook; the first definitive guide to solving the problem of scale.

Recommended by Sally Osberg

No one knows the not-for-profit sector and its most effective leaders better than Meehan and Jonker. Their book is a master class on what it takes to drive meaningful impact. In tackling the fundamental questions—strategy and focus, discipline and accountability—the authors get to the heart of what every mission-focused leader needs to understand. Engine of Impact is a book to read and re-read—the definitive guide for all who aspire to lead high performing and high achieving organizations. (from Amazon)

We are entering a new era—an era of impact. The largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will soon be under way, bringing with it the potential for huge increases in philanthropic funding. Engine of Impact shows how nonprofits can apply the principles of strategic leadership to attract greater financial support and leverage that funding to maximum effect. As Good to Great author Jim Collins writes in his foreword, this book offers "a detailed roadmap of disciplined thought and action for turning a good nonprofit into one that can achieve great impact at scale." William F. Meehan III and Kim Starkey Jonker identify seven essential components of strategic leadership that set high-achieving organizations apart from the rest of the nonprofit sector. Together, these components form an "engine of impact"—a system that organizations must build, tune, and fuel if they hope to make a real difference in the world. Drawing on decades of teaching, advising, grantmaking, and research, Meehan and Jonker provide an actionable guide that executives, staff, board members, and donors can use to jumpstart their own performance and to achieve extraordinary results for their organization. Along with setting forth best practices using real-world examples, the authors outline common management challenges faced by nonprofits, showing how these challenges differ from those faced by for-profit businesses in important and often-overlooked ways. By offering crucial insights on the fundamentals of nonprofit management, this book will help leaders equip their organizations to fire on all cylinders and unleash the full potential of the nonprofit sector. Visit www.engineofimpact.org for additional information.

Recommended by Sally Osberg

Buckle up! From the Bolivian Andes to the California lowlands, Jonathan takes you for a ride that will shake your inner radical free. By turns erudite and irreverent, angry and inspiring, this riveting, remarkable book nails what it means to be a social entrepreneur. On Lewis’s rollicking road to enlightenment, you’ll laugh out loud and be moved to tears. You’ll meet an unforgettable cast of characters who have shaped one self-proclaimed “unfinished” social entrepreneur in his life’s quest to right all that’s wrong in the world. Read this book to rekindle your passion, re-right your compass, and restore your belief in what human beings can achieve. Read this book to renew your soul. (from Amazon)

The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur is about powering up your social justice career. The world feels so screwed up, so unfair, so unnecessarily mean, so Trumpian. More than ever, the world needs you. This book is a book of conviction about the unfinished work of social justice. According to Lewis: "The crusty work of social entrepreneurship is as much fun as I’m permitted to have in public. It’s joyous, fulfilling and happy-making. Tackling big challenges is heady stuff. Fighting the good fight is utterly gratifying." The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur is a compendium of 21 original essays and insights - part memoir, part handbook - about the challenges and questions every social entrepreneur thinks about. For the novice changemaker, each chapter bristles with provocative tips and tools to transform your social justice career. Because social entrepreneurship is not called solo entrepreneurship, the book also contains 19 additional commentaries by other change-makers. Social entrepreneurs are a club of conscience. Sign up. Show up. Stand up. All book profits donated to social justice causes.