The most generous donors don’t want to pay for everything themselves. When I was a young (still in my twenties) executive director of a small human service agency we had…
In the early years after Alexander Graham Bell’s big discovery, people couldn’t agree on how to respond when the telephone rang. About half the people said, “Hello!” (That was the…
[Note: Raising the issue of excessive CEO salaries prompted a lot of comments from readers, most off-line, and additional posts from me. But here are my final words on the…
Let’s talk about nonprofit salaries. The greatest expenditure by most nonprofits is for staff salaries, which makes sense: a nonprofit typically doesn’t produce goods, as a manufacturer does, but services,…
For several years I went without a wristwatch. I had accidentally driven my car over the cheap Timex I owned, and I soon realized that I didn’t really need a…
When I was a kid, I loved the TV series “Batman.” There was a scene in every other episode, it seemed, where the caped crusader found himself trapped in a…
Sometimes relatively insignificant measures can assume an absurdly disproportionate importance. For decades U.S. News and World Reports has been ranking the country’s top universities and colleges. These rankings have taken…